foto adan chalino sanchez

Transcription

The “bad subjects” … on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (repressive) State apparatus.
But the vast majority of the (good) subjects work all right “all by themselves,” i.e., by ideology.
1
— Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
Political Education for Everyday Life
O c t o b e r
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I s s u e
# 6 1
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Alfred Arteaga
F R E E
of
Andy Gross and
Michael Hoffman
Delberto Ruiz
Arturo Aldama
David Sanjek
Leanne Macrae
Justin Shaw
Juana Suarez
Carlos Rivera
<http://eserver.org/bs>
Cheryl Greene and
Zachary Waggoner
Claudia Herbst
William Nerricio
Sarah Ramirez
Pancho McFarland
Peter Garcia
VIOLENCE
October 2002
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Bad Subjects
Bad Subjects
2
We call it the "info box"
October 2002
Bad Subjects
PRODUCTION DIRECTORS:
Charlie Bertsch, Joel Schalit, Jonathan Sterne
PRODUCTION TEAM:
California: John Brady, Cynthia Hoffman, Elisabeth
Hurst, JC Myers, Annalee Newitz, Megan Shaw
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Michigan: Mike Mosher (Saginaw/Bay City)
Pennsylvania: Jonathan Sterne (Pittsburgh); Scott
Schaffer (Millersville)
Washington: Geoff Sauer, webmaster (Seattle)
Arizona: Arturo Aldama, Joe Lockard (Tempe);
Charlie Bertsch, Kim Nicolini (Tucson)
Bad Subjects promotes radical thinking and public
education about the political implications of everyday
life. We offer a forum for re-imagining progressive
and leftist politics in the United States and the world.
We invite you to join us and participate in the Bad
Subjects project.
Bad Subjects is made possible through a
combination of donated labor, cash contributions, and
generous grants from the the Townsend Center for
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University of California at Berkeley. Our Web
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© 2002 BY THE AUTHORS
Credits: Cover image "Humaquina" by John Leaños; Cover, masthead, interior design and most of the delays for this
issue by Charlie Bertsch. Image on p.8 from promotional documents by Wilkomirski's American publisher; on p. 9, Jews
lining up for deportation to Buchenwald after Kristallnacht, 11/9/1938, from the Lorenz C. Schmuhl Papers, USHMM
Archives; Pacua Yacqui tribal seal on p. 11 from the Intertribal Council of Arizona's website <http://www.itcaonline.com/
Tribes/>; Movie still from Brotherhood of the Wolf on p.13 from Universal Studios' website; Image of movie poster for
Dario Argento's Tenebrae on p. 17 from <http://www.firelightshocks.com>; Drawing of Spike on p.18 from "wallpaper" on
a fan site in the UK, for which we lost the URL (but the artist was uncredited and it's not like the're paying for the rights
either; Image on p.22 of studio's DVD promtional poster for Falling Down-- available in about 10,000 locations -- taken
from website of "The Pathology Guy" <www.pathguy.com> because it captures the spirit of the film's protagonist; Movie
still from La vendedora de rosas on p.24 from program fro Human Rights Watch international film festival, June, 1999
<http://www.hrw.org/iff-99/prose.html>; Image of movie poster for La virgen de los sicarios on p. 25 taken from <http:/
/www.cartelia.net/l/lavirgen.htm>; Image on p. 29 is "Somos" by John Leaños; Screenshot from "Alien versus Predator"
game on p.33 from <http://daw.avpnews.com/avp2/avp2shots1.html>; Image on p.34 by Jose Luis Lopez-Reus; Stills
from television coverage on p.35 from rebroadcasting on CNN; reproductions of Leon Golub paintings "Interrogation" on
p. 36, "Kissenger" and "Brezhnev" on p.37, "Burnt Man" on p.38, and "Mercenaries V" on p.39 through permissions
secured by the article's author; Photo of LIla Downs on p.40 from <http://www.asu.edu/asunews/arts/
liladowns_041102.htm>; Reproduction of Alexander Hughes painting "Darkness" on p.42 courtesy of the artist; Photo of
Kid Frost on p.43 from <http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/default.asp?oid=5277>; Movie poster on p.46 for The Ballad
of Gregorio Cortez w/ Edward James Olmos, 1983; Image on p.48 by David Martinez; Reproduction of Ed Paschke
painting "Violencia" from the Ed Paschke Collection of the Whitney Museum in New York, courtesy of Paschke family
Visit Bad Subjects Online!
Our publication website: <http://eserver.org/bs>
Arturo Aldama and Joe Lockard
The urge to violence is deep-rooted in the human
psyche. Theoretical explanations invoke biomechanicism, social territorial defense, sexualities
and gender construction, displacement of social
anger, economic causes, class hierarchies, or other
plausible and implausible motivations for violence.
Many of these explanations have potential explanatory power.
Post-structural and post-colonial theory concerns
itself with how other disciplines deal with understanding the consumption of violence as entertainment and
“escape”, as well as the materiality of a violent act. It
does not do so in an empirical vacuum. One of the
issue editors raised these issues with a colleague, a
Freudian empiricist. What would appear from a
neural mapping and hormonal measurements of a
subject — in this case an 18-23 year-old male —
witnessing a violent film? She responded that there
would be a rise in testoterone and adrenaline levels,
and if there were monitors on the brain to indicate
increased neural activity through electro-synaptic
pulses, there would be large glow coming from
archipallium area. In evolutionary terms, this is the
reptilian part of the brain that includes the brain
stem, medulla, and cerbellum, and it produces a type
of primal pleasure response
The mind apparently interprets the actuality of
violence in in terms that are opposite to a pleasure
response and cause the body to withdraw, avoid and
fight back to insure its own survival. The trauma of
violence are stored in the brain and actually re-
Simple-minded condemnations of violent aesthetics
are useless; they lead to Tipper Gore-like campaigns
against rock lyrics. Besides the obvious point that we
enjoy a well-done indulgence of obscenity-filled music
or blow-up-the-bastards filmmaking, the politics of
condemnation are anti-progressive. The US right wing
has staked out an oppressive cultural politics that
opposes the public representation of violence in a
world where the violence propagated by American
policies is on everyday exhibit, at home and abroad. It
is crucial both to differentiate and to connect the
representation and the actualization of violence.
This linkage is what Alfred Arteaga undertakes in the
issue’s first essay, an examination of racialized and
sexualized violence in Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme.
Houellebecq, a leading contemporary French novelist
whose anti-Arab expressions have been a matter of
recent controversy in France, exemplifies First World
narrative conventions that employ Third World subjects
as the focus of simultaneous desire and violence. The
essay is particularly important to Bad Subjects because
Alfred Arteaga has for many years provided intellectual
inspiration and friendship to BS editors, and we are
deeply pleased at the opportunity to publish his work.
Andy Gross and Michael Hoffman take up another
controversial European text with an essay on the
Wilkomirski case in order to elaborate an understanding of memories of genocide. Delberto Ruiz ruminates
on the genocide of the Yoemem and Yaqui peoples,
and how Leslie Silko incorporates communal memory
into her writing.
October 2002
So, in laughing terms, watching violent films is
liking having reptile sex? Yes, she replied, there is a
pleasure response and a pleasure drive catalyzed by
these aesthetics. So then what would the neural and
hormonal mapping reveal in the case of “real” violence that (being shot, stabbed, etc.)? She said the
same areas of the mind would be stimulated but
instead of being interpreted as a pleasure response,
they would be interpreted as fear and flight/fight
response in the limbic (responsible for emotions) and
neocortex areas (decision-making, etc).
This issue of Bad Subjects employs not science, but
cultural criticism to search for an interpretive skein
within that overburdened word ‘violence’; this issue
examines the phenomenon’s representation and
aesthetics. US capitalism, which has historically been
predicated on the instrumentalization of violence to
achieve it systemic purposes, has learned to
commodify violence as a global media product. Every
Hollywood action film draws on a long-developed visual
vocabulary of violence, and as audiences we have
cultivated tastes for the narrative possibilities behind a
swift kiss of lead. This aesthetic permeates US cultural
products and their sponsoring national narrative.
However, the simple truth is that we do not know
the precise internal causes of human violence. In the
absence of convincing1 explanation, human societies
must deal with the legal, ethical and cultural consequences of mass and individual acts of violence.
Indeed, the range of these acts is so all-encompassing — from the violence of genocide to the violence of
a concealed fit of anger — that the word ‘violence’
itself nearly voids of meaning.
configure a subject’s neural mapping and the circuitry
of synaptic responses, resulting in post-stress traumatic disorder, with symptoms of extreme anxiety,
depression, mania, and overwhelming fear and disassociation. Yet violence is much more than a straightforward mapping exercise; it is a vastly complex
system of social governance in human societies that
resists empiricism.
3
Bad Subjects
Aesthetics of Violence:
Imagining Realities
October 2002
Bad Subjects
4
Arturo Aldama continues this survey of European
violence with a post-colonial reading of current French
cinema and its persistent reliance on racialist narratives. David Sanjek explores Euro-film further with an
essay on Dario Argento’s giallo work; from Australia,
Leanne Macrae provides a reading of the US export
Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and again from Australia,
Justin Shaw considers Joel Schumacher’s 1993 film,
Falling Down.
Juana Suarez writes on the manifestation of violence
in three Latin American films concerning Medellin. Bad
Subjects editorial policy encourages multilingualism,
this essay is Spanish-only, and other-than-English
articles or extracts will continue generally to appear
without translation. Carlos Rivera’s article on representation of violence against women in Puerto Rican
theater appears in Spanish too.
Cheryl Greene and Zachary Waggoner write about
video game violence, a medium that enables viewers
to participate in the representational mayhem instead
of functioning as passive consumers. Claudia Herbst
expands this inquiry with an essay on extreme sex and
death in video games. Bill Nerricio brings this video
preoccupation into focus with a brief essay on the
videotaped beating of a police beating of a woman in
southern California. Completing this section on
visualizations of violence, A. Scott historicizes and
elucidates the influence of US imperial violence on the
artwork of painter Leon Golub.
Because violence constitutes an expressive omnipresence, the issue pursues its aesthetics through a
variety of media. Sarah Ramirez considers the
transfrontera feminist music of Lila Downs as a source
of resistance to daily racial and gender violence.
Pancho McFarland responds to hyper-masculinist
violence in Chicano rap, and Peter Garcia discusses
the politics of the Mexican corrido as a communal
response to violence. Finally, Heidi Garcia looks at
tattoo culture and its representations of fear and
violence on the human body.
The imagery that fills this issue derives from the
European conquest of the Americas, from the absorbed experiences of violence, and from internal and
external conflicts. This issue attempts to articulate a
variety of aesthetic reformulations of the pain and
trauma of violence. Yet it cannot pretend to articulate
that experience. In the realities of violence, words
and images grow opaque and fail. From within this
simultaneous incapacity and surplus of speech, an
aesthetics of violence emerges.
Joe Lockard and Arturo Aldama, issue editors
A Tired Aesthetic
Alfred Arteaga
Race is tired. Fucking tired. The concept has seen
better days. The word itself came into the English
language half a millennium ago with the coming to the
Caribbean of one Italian sailor on a Spanish expedition.
As a descriptive device its authority has weakened
significantly, most tellingly perhaps, because its
implement of creation, the European phallus, hasn’t
written anything great of late.
While the master works of racism have been written,
texts such as those of discovery, conquest, colonialism, slavery, and the New World, the Euro pen is still
capable of becoming excited by current discourse of
race. Consider a contemporary Italian-Hispano in the
Caribbean, Aldo Bianchi, protagonist of Daniel
Chavarría’s El Rojo en la Pluma del Loro. As the novel
opens, Aldo, an Italian by way of the Río Plata, is tired.
He is fifty-five years old, divorced, and impotent. But
Aldo goes to Cuba and in minutes after meeting an
Afrocuban prostitute, he ejaculates in the racialized
vagina. In fact, he does so five times in their first four
hours together. And in his four days with Bini, Aldo
fucks well, twenty-five times.
When confronted by this miraculous display of the
power of racial intercourse, Aldo’s friends feel compelled to account for it. The success of such racialized
sex, especially when compared to the failure of the
marital sex, is understood within the parameters of
European racism. “No ignoraban que el embrujo de
los tambores y cánticos afrocubanos, más el ron, el
contagio eufórico, al lado de una hembra salvaje y
bella, pueden liberar pasiones reprimadas.” Bini is
reduced to her sex, an element of the exotic milieu
that allowed Aldo to relax. She is the savage female,
not necessarily human, but beautiful.
Such transparent racism is ironic in serious, contemporary literature, isn’t it? El Rojo en la Pluma del
Loro won Cuba’s 2000 Premio Casa de las Américas.
Chavarría, a Uruguayan who has lived in Cuba for
three decades, has the imprimatur of the revolution
and its literary organ. It must be ironic.
While the issue of the European and racialized sex
may serve to open Chavarría’s novel, it is the raison
d’être for a novel that has captured the contemporary
French imagination. Michel Houellebecq’s Plateforme
(Flammarion: 2001) is fully about racialized sex, its
practice, its commodification, its advertising. It is a
capitalist, first world, European vision of the current
state of the Euro phallus and as such, Plateforme
emerges as exemplar of its milieu.
The novel is unashamedly about sexual tourism,
specifically about the practice and marketing of
European sex with racial others. Various interlocutors
In Plateforme, Michel has lots of sex and, with
Valérie, devises and markets a sort of Club Med with
prostitutes. The novel is replete with interracial sex.
It is replete too with judgement, value, taste, and
discrimination in regard to racial others. To what
degree does Houellebecq avoid stereotype and
racism in his delineation of European sexual activities
with postcolonial subjects? Or more bluntly, is his
racism ironic?
But Plateforme itself belies the irony of the new Euro
phallus, belies the sense that the new prick is any less
a prick when it comes to racism. Its transformation
seems more catachresis than irony, more a twisted
similarity than an inversion or negation. True, the
current phallus differs from its past, and according to
Michel, it is due to a displacement of its reproductive
function, but it is not so different that it no longer
writes racism. It continues to do so. The displacement
of reproduction from the sphere of the sexual politic is
concomitant with the displacement in meaning, the
catachresis, of the phallus in the sexual aesthetic. The
phallus still writes and still means racism in the act of
sex, but the act itself has been displaced in sense and
in site.
With the diminution of the project of progeniture,
coitus is viewed as one variation of the sex act, its
preference merely a matter of taste. The vagina loses
some of its pre-eminence as preferred site of pleasure
for the heterosexual phallus and is frequently supplemented in Plateforme by the mouth and hand. The
phallus is less tied to the vagina because sex is less
tied to reproduction. The Euro pen is free to undertake
sex without the huge consequences of patriarchy and
miscegenation. In the vagina, as in the mouth and
hand, the penis can realize beauty, pleasure and desire
without recourse to racism. But race is differentiated at
the anus.
After many episodes of sex in various combinations
of races and body parts, there occurs one episode that
is noticeably different. Valérie and Michel meet “un
couple de Noirs sympa.” Nicole is a nurse, and Jerome
October 2002
In those time, the European also invented race.
And the notion potentially came into play every time
the Euro phallus engaged native vagina. Because
back then,
La situation était bien sûr différente dans les
précédents siècles, au temps où la sexualité était
quand même essentiellement liée à la reproduction.
But if the European history of patriarchy is written
as nostalgia, present day sexuality is written in
economic terms.
Pour mantenir la valeur génétique de l’espèce,
l’humanitié devait alors tenir le plus grand compte
des crières de santé, de force, de jeunesse, de viguer
physique–dont la beauté n’était qu’une synthèse
pratique. Aujourd’hui, la donne avait changé: la
beaute gardait toute sa valeur, mais il s’agissait
d’une valeur monnayable, narcissique. Si décidément
la sexualité devait rentrer dans le secteur des biens
d’échange, la meilleure solution était sans aucun
doute de faire appel à l’argent, ce médianteur
universel que permettait déjà d’assurer une
équivalence précise à l’intelligence, au talent, à la
What is this soft aesthete, the New Phallus, envisioned by Michel? If denied the function of procreation,
the Euro pen is denied to a great extent the function of
writing the master texts of patriarchy and racism. The
tired Euro phallus need not engender humans or
human difference, for sex with the racial other can be
merely a matter of pleasure, of discriminating tastes
and the realization of the desire for beauty. No longer
needing armies of soldiers, priests, and the police, the
New Phallus can rest and let money do the work.
5
The beginning of an answer might lie in a selfreflective passage in which Michel (the character? the
author?) considers the contemporary state of the
European phallus. He is almost nostalgic when he
considers its history,
Mes ancêtres européens avaient travaillé dur,
pendent plusieurs siècles; ils avaient entrepris de
dominer, puis de transformer le monde, et dans une
certaine mesure ils avaient réussi. Ils l’avaient fait
par intérèt économique, par goût du travail, mais
aussi parce qu’ils croyaient à la supériorité de leur
civilisation: ils avaient inventé le rêve, le progrès,
l’utopie, le future.
In other words, in greater times, times which
coincided with those of conquest, colonialism and
slavery, the Euro phallus was powerful and wrought
wondrous things. Hard working and ethnocentric
Europeans dominated the world and invented notions
such as dream and future.
compétence technique; qui avait déjà permis d’assurer
un standardisation parfaite des opinions, des goûts,
des modes de vie.
If we take Michel’s discourse at face value, we accept
the transformation of the Euro phallus: what it had
undertaken previously as a politic, it undertakes now
as an aesthetic. In other words, the former project of
dominating and civilizing the world was political, and in
that context, the intercourse of race and sex was hard
work. Miscegenation and eugenics, for example, were
hard work. But today’s phallus is fun. Freed from the
rigors of human reproduction and the writing of race,
the Euro pen is now able to experience race and sex
for the sake of beauty. Sex with the racial other need
not require the huge displacement of colonial power,
and it need not result in the subjects of miscegenation.
Instead, the tired phallus can undertake sterile sexual
relations, relations dictated by matters of beauty, of
discrimination, of taste, and of desire, specifically,
capitalist desire.
Bad Subjects
delineate the predilections. “On vous parlera de
Brésiliennes, ou des filles de Cuba. J’ai beaucoup
voyagé, monsieur, j’ai voyagé pour mon plaisir, et je
n’hésite pas à vous le dire: pour moi, les Thaïs sont
les meilleures amantes du monde.” Valérie, the main
French female character, declares, “C’est vrai, c’est
frappant, à force: les femmes blanches préfènt
coucher avec des Africains, les hommes blancs avec
des Asiatiques” (243). She asks the protagonist,
Michel, “Qu’est-ce que les Thaïs ont de plus que les
Occidentales.” She is answered verbally by Michel
and graphically by the narrator
October 2002
Bad Subjects
6
is a jazz drummer, cool and hip. Jerome proposes to
Valérie a double penetration. As Michel recounts, “Elle
accepta, à condition que ce soit moi qui la sodomise–il
fallait s’y prendre très doucement avec elle, j’avais
plus l’habitude.” Jerome and Michel simultaneously
penetrate Valérie, the black penis penetrating the
white vagina; the white penis, the white anus. After
Valérie orgasms, Nicole excitedly takes her place.
Nicole tells Michel, “Avec moi tu peux y aller... j’aime
bien qu’on m’encule fort.” The black penis penetrates
the black vagina, the white penis penetrates the black
anus, bringing Nicole to orgasm. The women then
kneel before Jerome and Michel, and while the men
talk jazz, they take the penises into their mouths:
black penis in white mouth, white penis in black
mouth. Jerome, “joit d’un seul coup, éjaculant
violemment dans la bouche de Valérie.” Valérie then
joins Nicole, instructing her how better to perform the
task, and Michel nearly faints.
What Plateforme proposes is a catachresis, a depiction of difference coupled with an assertion of fundamental similarity. The Euro phallus is different, and it
is the same. Yet such contradiction is not ironic, for the
primary articulation is not one of difference, but
rather, one of essence. The Euro phallus remains
essentially and fundamentally a racist prick.
tions of anal discourse where the phallus, removed
from reproduction, coitus, and the vagina, remains
bound to the exigencies of race. These variations of
the catachresis demonstrate how far the notion of the
phallus has stretched.
Two films, Storytelling (USA: 2002) and Monster’s
Ball (USA: 2001) demonstrate that the new phallus
need not be white nor seize its traditional privilege. In
Todd Solondz’s Storytelling, a black penis penetrates
the white anus in a scene that is obscured for viewers
by a red square, purportedly to avoid classification as
pornography. Mr. Scott, a tired black professor,
sodomizes Vi, his white student, and in the act,
demands that she utter racist epithets. The white
anus is transgressed racially, and the inappropriateness of such act is condemned according to a traditional racist ethics. A black phallus is still a phallus.
In Marc Forster’s Monster’s Ball, the anal encounter
of the Euro American phallus is opposite that of the
French in Plateforme. Hank is a tired racist, tired of
killing blacks, so tired that he can’t penetrate the
white anus. He fails with a white prostitute, who
keeps his money and screws him in the process. He is
rejuvenated by Leticia, a black woman, almost in the
same manner that Aldo is rejuvenated by Bini in
Daniel Chavarría’s novel. In his first attempt at
heteroracial sex, Hank first tries anal penetration, but
is rebuffed. Leticia turns over and the two engage in
coitus happily. A very traditional sexual relationship
is espoused.
In the logic of the catachresis, the anus gains new
prominence. It replaces the vagina as the site of racial
transgression.
Heteroracial
coitus is fine,
preferable in
fact, but
heteroracial
sodomy is
taboo. Valérie
takes the black
penis into her
vagina and
mouth, but
rejects the
black penetration of her
anus. Michel’s
white penis is
free to fuck
vagina and anus of any color. This is not fundamentally
different from tradition. Michel’s European ancestors,
in their dissemination of civilization through acts such
as colonialism and slavery, worked very hard penetrating colored vaginas and restricting colored access to
white vaginas. What is different is the shift of focus
from vagina to anus, and it is this difference that
underscores the new phallic order.
Tony Kaye’s American History X is as much about
race and violence as is Baise-Moi about sex and
violence. White supremacist Derek is raped in prison
because he becomes a race traitor, because he
engages in discourse with a black inmate. The white
anus is transgressed by a white penis as punishment
for opposing traditional racism. The phallus need not
be heterosexual.
The anus is thus the site of whiteness. Houellebecq is
not alone in articulating this discourse. Plateforme
coincides with other articulations of the catachresis:
the new but tired phallus is as racist as the old, hard
working phallus, but relates to the anus rather than
the vagina. In all these articulations, the phallus is still
the phallus in essence, though at times hard to recognize. Four examples, all from cinema, explore varia-
These films and Plateforme hint at irony but promote a catachresis that functions much in the way
that does Bakhtin’s carnival: on the day of carnival
(or at the site of the anus) traditional hierarchy is
inverted only to be reestablished the day following.
There is nothing radical or revolutionary in the new
phallus. Consider, for example, what is affirmed in
three gratuitious instances in Plateforme.
Two other films, Baise-Moi (France: 2000) and
American History X (USA: 1998), focus on the
transgression of the anus, white and male. In one of
the more sexually violent scenes of Baise-Moi, a film
full of sexual violence, Manu, an ethnic minority
woman, penetrates a Frenchman’s anus with a pistol
and shoots. It is a particularly violent ejaculation,
expressing sexual rage for sure, but also, race rage.
For Manu is colored, and yet perhaps more significantly, the victim and anus are male and white. In
Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Ti’s vision, the
endless displays of sex and violence are weak on a
feminist politic and reaffirm traditional hierarchies of
race. The phallus need not have a penis.
In long racist diatribe, an Egyptian declares that
Arabs have nothing to do “que d’enculer leur
chameaux.” The Egyptian “exagérait un peu, mais
c’etait un Oriental,” but confirms the racist French
vision of the lowest of the low: Arabs transgress the
anus not across race lines but across species.
Minor character Jean-Yves has sex with the new
babysitter, fifteen year old Eucharistie from Dahomey.
“Elle savait très précisément, par ses gémissements,
deviner l’instant où il allait venir. Elle éloignait alors
son visage; avec petits mouvements précis elle
orientait son éjaculation, parfois vers se seins, parfois
vers sa bouche. Elle avait à ces moments une expression joueuse, presque enfantine...”
That the novel so coincides with history is ironic. But
there is no irony in either the fictive or factual response. Michel responds fictively, as has the first world
historically, by invoking the proven politic and tired
aesthetic of race:
Chaque fois que j’apprenais qu’un terroriste
palestinien, ou un enfant palestinien, ou une femme
enceinte palestinienne, avait été abattu par balles dans
la bande de Gaza, j’éprouvais un tressaillement
d’enthousiasme à la pensée qu’il y avait un musulman
de moins.
_______________
Alfred Arteaga is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at
University of California - Berkeley and a beloved friend of Bad
Subjects editors.
Reflections on a Holocaust Impostor:
Fragments and Its Tortured History
Andrew Gross and Michael Hoffman
Wilkomirski’s Fragments was immediately measured
against the standard of Wiesel and Levi, and it came
out well. Wiesel himself complimented the book when
it was published in English. Wilkomirski’s narrative
was unusual in that it was one of the few survivors’
testimonies to be written deliberately from a child’s
perspective. It contained scenes of incredible vividness and used a fragmented narrative structure that
reminded readers of classic twentieth-century novels,
as well as a self-conscious narrative voice associated
with post-modern forms of writing. The reviews were
almost uniformly ecstatic and the book was eventually
translated into a dozen languages.
Although not a huge bestseller, Fragments earned a
number of prestigious awards in England, France, and
the U.S. As a result, Wilkomirski became something of
a public figure, being interviewed on television shows,
participating in performances in which he played the
clarinet while someone recited from Fragments, and
giving talks sponsored in the United States by the U.
S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Response to
Wilkomirski seemed especially strong from other
Holocaust survivors, who saw him as a spokesman for
their own painful experiences. The greatest sales
occurred here in the U. S., which has the largest
collection of Holocaust survivors of any other country
and is a place where Holocaust remembrance has
become a highly organized cultural phenomenon.
October 2002
In 1995 a book called Bruchstücke, or Fragments,
was published in Switzerland. It was a memoir of a
Jewish child’s experiences in ghettos and Nazi death
camps. The first-time author was Binjamin
Wilkomirski – until now a musician and maker of
clarinets – and the narrative indicated that he was a
survivor. Survivors’ narratives have become a major
form of autobiographical writing in the past half
century. Most such narratives are the only books by
their authors, and are often written with the help of
someone else. Some of these autobiographical
narratives, however, have become literary classics
and are therefore the standard against which other
survivors’ narratives are measured. Elie Wiesel’s
Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, for
instance, have become part of the university curriculum in modern literature and not just in courses on
the Holocaust.
7
The Euro pen is alive and well, racist, orientalist,
sexist, and pedophile. There seems to be no irony in
Michel’s declaration:
Européen aisé, je pouvais acquéir à moindre prix,
dans d’autres pays, de la nourriture, des services et
des femmes; Européen décadent, conscient de ma
mort prochaine, et ayant pleinement accédé à
l’égoïsme, je ne voyais aucune raison de m’en priver.
Yet Plateforme does participate in an irony of history.
The novel’s publication in September, 2001, coincides
with the 9/11 attacks on the first world’s organs of
capital and the military. The climax of Plateforme, its
most violent ejaculation, is a mass slaughter of European sex tourists in Thailand by “trois hommes
enturbannés”. Turban functions as metonym for
Muslims, who in turn stand as obstacles to Euro
phallocentric rule. Muslims are inhumane, anti-capitalist fundamentalists who transgress the anus of camels
and who oppose free market sex.
Bad Subjects
Valérie is not the only European woman confronted
by the specter of racialized anal sex. Marylse is raped
by a group of Caribbeans, “Ils l’avaient pénétrée
violemment, sans ménagements, par tous les orifices.”
October 2002
Bad Subjects
8
Although there had been a few dissenting voices in
the chorus of praise for Fragments, few people—
Wilkomirksi perhaps least of all—were prepared for the
reversal of fortune that began to occur during the
summer of 1998. On August 28 of that year a Swiss
journalist named Daniel Ganzfried published “an article
[in] . . . Die Weltwoche in which he accused
Wilkomirski of having invented his autobiography” (our
italics). Ganzfried claimed that Wilkomirski had never
been in a concentration camp and that he had actually
been born in Switzerland in 1941. Having carefully
researched his subject, Ganzfried claimed that
Wilkomirski was in fact born as Bruno Grosjean and
wasn’t even Jewish. Wilkomirski immediately denied
these allegations, and a number of people associated
with him came to his defense. Ganzfried’s article was
summarized by a number of newspapers in Europe and
the United States, and these were followed in 1999 by
two long, thoughtful essays—in Granta by Elena
Lappin, and in the New Yorker by Philip Gourevitch—
which supported Ganzfried. Gourevitch’s tone, in
particular, was stern and unforgiving. All of
Wilkomirski’s publishers, including Schocken (the
American publisher), eventually pulled the book out of
circulation. He was quickly transformed from heroic
Holocaust testifier to pariah, from sympathetic victim
to betrayer.
In April 1999 Wilkomirski’s Swiss agent Liepman, in
response to all the controversy, hired Swiss historian
Stefan Maechler to pursue an independent investigation. Wilkomirski maintained throughout this period
that his critics were trying to steal his life; that he was,
in effect, a singular victim of Holocaust denial. But by
this time he had lost his credibility, and it was soon
impossible to find Fragments anywhere but in a usedbook store. The complaints from a variety of sources
were frequently vituperative, with some critics retracting their earlier praise, prize-givers withdrawing
recognition, and many journalists as well as survivors
condemning Wilkomirski as a criminal who gave
satisfaction to the Holocaust deniers.
Maechler’s findings against Wilkomirski were made
public in 2000—again accompanied by Wilkomirski’s
denials—and a book presenting his analytic narrative
which included Fragments as an appendix was published in English by Schocken in 2001. For the first
time in two years Fragments was back in print.
Why Did Wilkomirski Do It?
The history of Wilkomirski’s life, as established by
Maechler, suggests that he was born out of wedlock to
a twenty-six-year old woman, Yvonne Grosjean, and it
is the name Bruno Grosjean that appears on his Swiss
birth certificate. When Bruno was two years old he
was for the first time placed in foster care. He lived
thereafter in a series of such homes, and the records
in the guardian’s offices indicate that he became
increasingly difficult to manage.
finalized until 1957, when Bruno was sixteen. Why
did the Dossekkers wait so long to formalize their
relationship with this child, and what effect might the
lingering uncertainty have had on young Bruno? It is
clear from the records that Wilkomirski experienced a
traumatic, frequently disrupted early childhood. In
Fragments he describes the couple based on the
Dossekkers as being almost emotionally frigid (a
description confirmed by others), and so he had to
live—even in comfortable circumstances—without
parental warmth and emotional support.
In 1979 Wilkomirski met an Israeli psychologist
named Elitsur Bernstein who had been practicing in
Zurich for twenty years. With Bernstein, Wilkomirski
began to work on recovering his “repressed memories.” It is these memories that allegedly make up
the substance of Fragments—that of a traumatized
small child bereft of parents, who has witnessed the
death of his father and experienced the abandonment, restoration, and finally death of his mother in a
concentration camp barracks. The book is full of
mother figures, all of whom fail the small, nameless
boy in some way.
To support his obsessive historical studies
Wilkomirski has apparently amassed a library of more
than two thousand books related to the Holocaust.
He is expert on most aspects of that history and has
read more than his share of survivors’ autobiographical narratives. What seems to have happened is that
in creating his own autobiographical narrative
Wilkomirski retained the emotional traumas that lie at
the heart of his emotional dissociation, but substituted for the actual events of his early childhood
events drawn from the history of the Jews in the
Holocaust, a subject on which he has apparently
brooded for more than thirty years. It is a history full
of the deaths and disappearances of parents, the
brutality and emotional aridity of surrogate parent
figures, and the apparent nurturance and abandonment by mother figures.
All of this does not suggest someone maliciously
setting out to deceive others as much as someone
who has willfully adopted a level of traumatic autobiography to fit the level of his own emotional disturbance. In the process, he has succeeded in deluding
himself into accepting these fictions as “facts.” It
seems apparent, then, that this troubled man believes
his own story and has conveyed that belief so passionately and effectively that he has persuaded others
to believe it as well. Geoffrey Hartman uses the term
“memory-envy” to describe the feeling of those who,
coming after the Holocaust, long to identity with the
survivors. Wilkomirski, by substituting a story of the
Holocaust for his own life history, at once validates
his personal trauma and becomes the honored member of a group whose contemporary identity is a
function of historical persecution.
The Context of Wilkomirski’s Career as a Writer
When (in 1945) Bruno was four years old he became
the foster child of Dr. & Mrs. Kurt Dossekker of Zurich,
a childless older couple. Although Wilkomirski continued living with the Dossekkers, the adoption was not
Explaining the arc of Wilkomirski’s critical success
and subsequent fall, historian Stefan Maechler points
out that “The author of Fragments would not have
The Holocaust serves another political function in
the U.S., which Novick feels is increasingly preoccupied with identity politics and victimization. In a
society where victimhood is a virtue, the Holocaust
gives Jews a perverse preeminence, setting them
apart as a secular equivalent of the “chosen people”.
Novick argues that even gentiles are apt to treat Jews
as exemplary victims because it is easy to identify
with an assimilated Jewish population. Also, the
In “America, the Holocaust, and the
Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a
Radical Politics of Empathy,” Alison
Landsberg praises the Holocaust
Museum for offering a “transferential
space” where “memory and affect get
transferred from one person to another.” She feels the museum is most
effective when it encourages visitors
to experience what it was like to be a
victim so they can remember, through
their own experiences in the museum,
how it must have felt: “these spaces
[of transference] might actually install in us ‘symptoms’ or prosthetic memories through which we didn’t
actually live, but to which we now, after a museum
experience or a filmic experience, have a kind of
experiential relationship.”
Wilkomirski poses a problem for Landsberg because
he illustrates the impossibility of distinguishing prosthetic memory from memory-envy. In fact, he creates
a problem for all those who view memory—i.e. testimony and autobiography—as a privileged form of
historical discourse. What the theories of prosthetic
memory and testimony have in common is their belief
that subjective memories, no matter how erroneous,
offer a necessary corrective to the cold, clinical way
history is normally compiled. Theorists and psychologists like Landsberg, Shoshona Felman, and Dori Laub
emphasize affect rather than fact; interviewers in the
Survivor’s Project don’t correct inaccurate testimony.
It is worth noting that even Wilkomirski’s harshest
critics don’t doubt the authenticity of his suffering per
se. Daniel Ganzfried attributes Wilkomirski’s false
October 2002
According to Novick, the Holocaust
became important as a collective
memory when the American Jewish
community began to feel threatened by
a “demographic crisis” of secularization
and assimilation, replacing ritual,
belief, and traditional forms of community as the defining center of American
Judaism. Though many commentators
see the resurgence of Holocaust
thought 30 years after the event as the
return of the repressed, Novick argues
that the recent explosion of books and
films about the Holocaust should be
understood politically, not psychologically. Neither the Nuremberg trials nor
the Eichmann trial produced as much interest in the
Holocaust as did the Six-Day War of 1967, when the
State of Israel seemed threatened with extinction.
The Holocaust helped explain that war as the resurgence of murderous anti-Semitism. In our time, it
serves a different ideological function, justifying, for
instance, what critics of Israel call “the occupation” as
a form of self-defense. Though Israel’s difficulties
since the 1970s stem primarily from war and the
struggle for land, it is easier to recruit support for
Israel, Novick claims, by arguing that the Palestinian
uprising is the Holocaust in a new form.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum, like Wilkomirski’s
book, also allows us to enter the debate over the uses
and abuses of bearing witness in Holocaust studies.
Not only does the museum privilege survivor testimony—giving videos from, for instance, the Survivor’s
Project a central place in the exhibits—it also encourages visitors to experience the Holocaust on a personal
level by assigning identity cards bearing the names of
victims. The prescribed itinerary takes visitors over
actual cobblestones from the Lodz ghetto, and through
a cattle car once used to transport
Jews to concentration camps. The
emphasis is on the visceral, the
emotive, and the artifactual; the
museum personalizes history, encouraging visitors to identify with and put
themselves in the place of the victims.
Is this not precisely what Wilkomirski
has done?
9
Testimony and identification have become central to
the way we remember the Holocaust in the West,
especially in America; so to understand the
Wilkomirski affair, we must first explore the function
of the Holocaust in Western politics and culture.
Towards this end, Maechler turns to the historian
Peter Novick, whose recent book, The Holocaust in
American Life (1999), tackles the
related questions of why the Holocaust
has become central to Jewish-American
identity, and why it has become
important in the U.S., a country that
had no direct experience of the events.
Holocaust provides an easy, if relatively empty, point
of political consensus, since even those who disagree
about policy towards Bosnia or Rwanda can agree that
the Holocaust was a bad thing. Bearing witness, or
testimony, performs an important double role in this
process of consensus forming, at once personalizing
the Holocaust, making it easier to identify with the
victims, and creating an unbridgeable gap, the gap of
experience or autobiography, between historical
atrocity and current politics.
Bad Subjects
unleashed such outrage if he had simply thought up
any given biography.” The Holocaust, according to
Maechler, is not off-limits per se; politicians and
historians have “applied it as a metaphor to the
Gulag, to Palestinian refugees, to the transatlantic
slave trade, to their own personal suffering, to endangered nature.” Wilkomirski, however, appropriates
the Holocaust not only as metaphor but as memory.
This encourages readers, both survivors and those
who have no direct relation to the Holocaust, to
identify with his memories, and to treat them as a
kind of historical evidence now approaching extinction: the survivor’s testimony.
memories to methodologically flawed psychology.
Elena Lappin quotes Israel Gutman, a Yad Vashem
historian and survivor, who says Wilkomirski’s story is
“important” even if it is not true because he “experienced [it] deeply” (Lappin 46). Gourevitch finds it
plausible that Wilkomirski might be “a victim of his
own sense of victimization.” Wilkomirski’s memories
straddle an irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of
what it means to testify: his trauma is authentic, but
his testimony isn’t.
So if Wilkomirski has come by his prosthetic memories in the prescribed way, through a “radical politics of
empathy,” and if those memories are affectively, if not
factually, true, what are we to do with his false testimony? This practical question actually involves two
deeper, epistemological ones: How do we determine
the accuracy of testimony? What kind of knowledge
does testimony provide? The Wilkomirski affair proves
beyond a doubt that the first question has no satisfactory answer. Many readers, including survivors,
believed the tale because it is so excruciating, but now
October 2002
Bad Subjects
10
that the details have turned out to be more pornographic than realistic, we know that affect is no guarantee of authenticity. Form is also no guarantee.
Though the narrative looks like a survivor’s testimony,
with its fragmented narrative and damaged point-ofview, it is, as critics point out, merely a pastiche of
testimonies. Those who began by comparing it to Eli
Wiesel’s Night now invoke Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted
Bird, another discredited survivor’s tale told from a
child’s point of view, which Wilkomirksi admits to
having read. Though it might be possible to define
testimony as a genre, determining where books like
Fragments and The Painted Bird fall short, neither the
form of a testimony nor its emotive power can determine its authenticity.
It seems plausible that we will still read Fragments
for its emotional power in the same way we read
other fictional accounts of the Holocaust. Fiction, of
course, can teach us much about fact. However,
Fragments is not merely fiction, but fictionalized
memory, and memory implies a specific relation of
history to historical subjects. According to Walter
Benn Michaels, we tend to transform history into
memory as a way of constituting cultural identities.
“We learn about other people’s history,” he says, “we
remember our own.” This distinction gets at the
heart of the Wilkomirski scandal, since it explains why
Wilkomirksi’s supporters and his critics take the book
so personally. Perhaps we read Fragments to remember what it means to be Jewish, or more broadly,
what it means to be a victim. Now the same book
reminds us that memories are metaphors and identities are constructed. The inaccuracy of these memories does not plunge us into a historical crisis in the
same way that a delusional Napoleon does not discredit Waterloo. Rather, unstable memories plunge
us into a crisis of identity. Exposing Wilkomirski’s
testimony as memory-envy exposes our
interest in testimony as another form of
memory-envy. If we identified with him
as a victim, we are also implicated in his
delusions of victimization.
Wilkomirski teaches us that we read
autobiography not to learn about a person
but to learn about a people. Autobiographies are questionable sources of historical evidence, but they are paramount
vehicles of collective memory. Autobiographies, in the form of testimonies, have
helped transform the Holocaust into a
foundational myth for a Jewish identity no
longer grounded in custom or belief. The
emphasis on memory over knowledge has
had the effect of transforming Holocaust
studies into a secular religion, with
Auschwitz taking the place of the
Diaspora. The presence of the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. suggests that the Holocaust also
serves as a foundational myth for American identity. By honoring the victims and
celebrating the American role in liberating the concentration camps, the U.S. figures itself as a democracy
ready to fight the “evil ones”—to borrow President
Bush’s recent, memorable phrase.
Fragments is a controversial book because it
exposes the machinations behind some of our most
cherished myths. It teaches us that a “people” is as
contingent as its history, and that memory is a
political metaphor. Wilkomirski might not be an
actual victim of the Holocaust, but he is a fitting
monument to victim culture.
_______________
Andrew Gross <asgross@ucdavis.edu> is a Faculty Fellow at
The University of California - Davis English department.
Michael Hoffman <mjhoffman@ucdavis.edu> retired from
the same department as a Renaissance scholar to take up a
new career in tennis.
Delberto Dario Ruiz
As a Yoemem, these accounts are difficult for me to
talk about and even more disturbing to write about.
The humans who I write about here are my ancestorsmany who guide me now as I write these words. Leslie
Marmon Silko's punctic passage from Almanac of the
Dead shocks, jolts and saddens the reader as she
recounts the brutality of the military campaign against
Yoemem, Geronimo and other "native" threats to the
Mexican government:
The red signifies the blood this country has endured
for over five hundred goddamned years of treacherous racism. Blue, the ever-increasing military and
police state colors the voice of "hue-people" with
notes that leaves one singing nothing but the blues.
And finally white, the same "lovely white" Benjamin
Franklin wrote about in Observation Concerning the
Increase of Mankind (1751) — or more to the point
white supremacy. To forget or deny such is true
would be an inexcusable act and disrespect for those
who gave their lives so we — the Yoemem and other
subalterns — could continue to exist and resist.
…hanging in all the lovely cottonwood trees along the
rives and streams throughout this land. Swaying in
the light wind, rags of clothing flapping the shrunken
limbs into motion. They try to walk, they try to walk
— the feet keep reaching long after the neck has
broken or the head has choked. In those days the
Mexican soldiers were not particular about how many
they killed so long as they were Indians . . . They
were all hunting the Apaches running with the man
they called Geronimo. That was not his name. . . The
man encouraged the confusion. He has been called a
medicine man, but that title is misleading. He was a
man who was able to perform certain feats.
Yoemem and Bodies of History
Some of the bodies from previous centuries that
come to mind as I write now: the countless Yoemem
hanged throughout Sonora, and the countless
Yoemem rounded up and shipped to Oaxaca and the
henequen plantations in Yucatan. Yoemem were
signaled out for deportation and a life of slavery for
no other reason than being Yoemem, caught up in a
global division of labor with whites on top and others
on the bottom.
For Yoemem, and neighboring indigenous nations,
land was and continues to be central to their survival,
both in a material and spiritual sense. Such ways for
viewing and interacting with the land for Yoemem and
their neighbors, had long been practiced before
Spaniards, then Mexicans and finally US citizens and
Europeans forced their capitalist avariciousness and
glaringly bankrupt spiritual entities upon and throughout the Américas.
White Supremacist Narratives
Such master narratives continue to be disseminated
through racist grade school and high school curricula
across the nation, designed to bolster a white supremacist agenda while simultaneously discounting a
more accurate depiction of what, how and why the
United States was founded upon — white supremacy.
Such narratives would have us believe the "pioneers"
(not invaders) experienced tremendous hardships —
and I suppose they may well have. Missing, however,
is that whites would not have lived without the critical
assistance of Native American generosity and knowing.
One glaring problem with such Euro-centric ways for
conveying the histories of the Américas is the effective
October 2002
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the
Yoemem endured the porfiriato plan of pan o palo
(bread or club) under which President Porfirio Díaz's
regime carried out programs to rid the Río Yaqui
valley of Yoemem. Couched in the terminology of
pacification, such a program is more accurately
descried for what it was — violent violations of basic
human rights. The underlying issue was land for
capitalist ventures and equated concepts of value. In
this case, as in similar cases, the value of Yoemem
lay on their willingness to accommodate the colonizers' political, social and capitalist desires.
Missing from most historical accounts in Mexico and
the US is how Apaches and Yoemem were forced to
engage in struggles for survival. Most narratives depict
the Apaches and Yoemem as "hostile factions." However, in contrast to whites, Yoemem and Apaches were
not motivated by a racist-colonialist-capitalist endeavor to create an empire; instead their actions are
about survival and about the desire to be left alone.
Apaches and Yoemem who successfully outmaneuvered Mexican and US government military forces are
rarely portrayed as formidable thinkers. Their beautiful
aesthetic that aided thinking about and negotiating the
horrible persecution they faced on a daily basis is
glaringly overlooked. Instead we are consistently
bombarded with the "heroics" of the great settlers, the
original cannibals — those who came to conquer.
Dead bodies swinging from trees leave spiritual
scars difficult to erase in the span of a lifetime, much
like the flag of violence and what it represents for
subalterns as it wags from the tongues of politicians
bent on more war. Or especially if it has drooped from
flagpoles in too many penitentiaries housing a disproportional amount of people of color, not to mention
those flags used to drape caskets of war victims.
11
Bad Subjects
Ornaments of the Rio Yaqui
and Beyond
Bad Subjects
12
and overwhelming veiling of those who experienced far
greater hardships at the hand of the Euro-invaders and
their relentless and glaringly repeated acts of violence.
The intruders were hell-bent on taking that which
never belonged to them. They terrorized, raped,
tortured, and killed. A thief, murder and rapist, regardless of motive, remains a thief, murderer and rapist in
contrast to racist justifications attempting to minimize
and discount such acts as mirroring those of other
societies that came before. Such responses to the
genocide carried out by Europeans across the Américas
are nothing more than ploys to further obscure the
truth. Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin, as others too numerous to mention here, are all complicit and in many
ways mirrored and utilized similar methods for displacing, disposing and killing on a scale that can be described as calculated, brutal, extensive and appalling.
Such acts can be accurately summarized as linked to
what Silko and others call the, "witchery ways" devoid
of conscious human feelings and their devastating
consequences.
During periods of history when the US government
extended its policies aimed at eradicating North
American Indians, Mexican officials similarly focused
on the Yoemem in the northern region of what is now
referred to as the Sonoran state of
Mexico. The Mexican government
and transnational mine owners had
long wished to oust the Yoemem
from their rightful lands. The
Yoemem, for their part, never
relinquished their own desires to
remain upon their land. Yoemem
believe that the land was given to
them by the Creator to care for. The
land was not to serve them, but
rather humans were here to serve
the land. Yoemem, as other nations,
paid dearly for their resistance to
colonization and displacement. A
great number of Yoemem women,
children and men perished under
the different Mexican political
regimes that sought to eliminate
them.
October 2002
Resistance and Interconnection
How did the Yoemem survive and
resist under conditions that can be
succinctly described as relentless persecution and
unwavering determination by outside forces to see
them eradicated? One answer lies in the Yoemem
staunch refusal to be dominated. In addition, Yoemem
have always known where they are from and as Silko
states "stolen" land cannot have a title:
Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans'
own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because
stolen land never had clear title.
From 1830 to 1859, then-governor of Sonora
Manuel Gándara was the main political force in
Sonora. In Gándara's final closing battles against
General Pesqueira from 1857 to 1862, Yoemem were
forced to engage in a continued military counter-effort
against the Pesqueira faction. Pesqueira finally
entered the Río Yaqui and Río Mayo Valley area in
1862 after first defeating Gándara. A staunch believer
in enforced "peace" (much as we see with the current
war on Afghanistan), Pesqueira and his assistant,
Colonel García Morales, initiated a relentless campaign against Yoemem and Yoremem. Many were
captured and executed; Yoemem lands, together with
those of the Yoremem, were ruthlessly destroyed.
Among the most heinous acts committed by General
García Morales's and his forces was the burning of
some 450 Yoemem children, women and men as they
prayed for their lives in the Bacum church located
along the Rio Yaqui.
Over the years leading up this particular massacre
and those that followed, the Yoemem had "opened up
a can of whup-ass." After defeating the Spaniards,
not once, but three times, the Yoemem pressed for
peace. Rarely do victors initiate peace negotiations
with the losing side. This is but one example of how
Native Americans have consistently demonstrated
remarkable humanitarian restraint that
challenges the selfprofessed superiority
of the invaders. For
Europeans, such acts
read as signs of
weakness or anomalies. From the subaltern side of the
colonial difference,
these initiatives are
signs of a spiritual
consciousness not
fully comprehended
by those blinded and
maddened by the
sight and smell of
blood. In fact, with
pomp and ceremony
on April 15, 1610,
General Hurdaide
agreed to an honorable, if not baffling
peace agreement.
Perhaps his agreement becomes clearer when one
considers how a defeat is usually enough to alter
one's perception toward a perceived nemesis.
When the Yoemem were first invaded by dirty, foulsmelling, disease-carrying Spaniards in the 16th
century they were an agricultural society dispersed in
rancherias, or small settlements, throughout the
Yaqui Valle in the southern part of Sonora. Linguistically, culturally and, "phenotypically" they share
many commonalties with the Yoremem (Mayo) tribe,
which lies directly south in yet another river valley.
Yoemem, Yoremem and a dozen other tribes speak a
The most commonly-known Yoemem communities
are the eight villages, or ho'ara as they are called in
Yoemem. Others, like US and Mexican nationals,
refer to them as los ocho pueblos. The eight ho'ara
are the direct result of Jesuit consolidation of the
dispersed population from over eighty rancherias
into eight mission towns by the 17th century. The
following words from Calabazas, one of the Yoeme
characters in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the
Dead, speak to concepts of space and place imposed by the various invaders and to a Yoemem
Weltanschauung antagonistic to such socially,
politically and economically imposed Euro-constructs:
For Yoemem, their homelands were established
by a divine fiat and supernatural sanctions. From
East to West the names of the villages are as
follows: Cocorit, Bacum, Torim, Vicam, Potam,
Rahum, Huiviris and Belem. For millennia, a connection to the land has been of utmost importance
to Yoemem culture. In their view, The Creator, in
the Yoemem worldview, is directly responsible for
having bestowed upon them the Yoemem lands.
Deep-seated beliefs — of which a more powerful
and resolute relationship cannot be found within
Yoemem culture — affirm a sense of place and
responsibility for maintaining a sacred spiritual
Today, when overt persecution has been replaced by
covert persecution, Yoemem culture and tribal solidarity are subject to more subtle change-producing
forces, and yet nonetheless the basic context of
Yoemem culture seems remarkably unrelenting. One
explanation can be found in an adamant refusal to
relinquish ceremonial practices. At the same time, oral
stories passed down from generation to generation are
also critical for reinforcing specific social identities
amongst Yoemem. The recent historical novel Dreams
of the Centaur (1996) by Montserrat Fontes describes
a mother's attempt to maintain her family under
oppressive conditions during the forced exodus of
Yoemem from their lands under the death-dispensing
regime of Porfirio Díaz and his pan o palo policy. But
most Yoemem stories come from an oral tradition. For
more than a few Yoemem, these stories assist in
remembering where we come from and where we must
go. Etehoi, a Yoemem word for tellings, contributes to
countering colonial discourses:
Etehoi, the Yaquis call it. Tellings. Etehoi is how
Yaquis record events, according to Jose. He'd keep
after Tacho, saying "Etehoi, etehoi," until he'd
prodded the old man to tell him again of the Cajeme
days. (Fontes, Dreams)
For Yoemem, these etehoi and bwikam chronicle
events that contribute to creating almanacs for those
here and those to come. As Silko also writes in Ceremony, "don't be fooled, they are not just stories." If
we want to go to the moon, to paraphrase Silko, we
have to know the stories.
Re-tellings like these are but a fraction of the violations inflicted upon, resisted by, and told by Yoemem.
Sadly there are far too many more. It is my hope that
in revisiting tellings we can build a better tomorrow. If
not, then at least we go down fighting. Emiliano
Zapata reportedly once said, although not in English, "I
would rather die on my feet than live on my
knees. . .". I too would rather go out raging against
the "machine" than accept the racist discourses,
policies, and sanctions resulting in material and
spiritual caging of Others. In a country driven by
violence it is not too hard to imagine that more of the
same awaits us, for we live within the boundaries of a
nation-state whose legacy is saturated in the blood of
native Others.
______________
Delberto Ruiz <deldruiz@socrates.Berkeley.edu>is a doctoral
candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California Berkeley.
October 2002
We don't believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing
like that. We are here thousands of years before
the first whites. We are here before maps or quit
claims. We know where we belong on this earth.
We have always moved freely. North-South. EastWest. We pay no attention to what isn't real.
Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours.
Written law. We recognize none of that. And we
carry a great many things back and forth. We
don't see any border. We have been here and this
has continued thousands of years. We don't stop.
No one stops us.
Etehoi, Etehoi
13
Linking these tribes through their linguistic
commonalties points to their obvious interactions.
In other words, prior to the arrival of the invaders
from Europe, tribes had long-established forms for
interacting and exchanging ideological and material
forms. In short, concepts of political borders were
virtually non-existent prior to the arrival of Europeans. What modernity and colonialism introduced —
two sides of the same coin since 1492 — has been
the establishment of native Others. Prior to this
period there existed no notions of "race" as we refer
to it. Hence, with the arrival of the Spaniards, entire
ways for living foreign to the original inhabitants
were suddenly and disturbingly imposed on communities that had markedly different ways of viewing
the world, and all that makes up the universe-both
tangible and not.
relationship with the land and all of its inhabitants. As
such, the Yoemem fight to survive does not include
any desire to create an empire, to dominate others, or
to subjugate humans to sub-human positions. In
contrast to Western ideology, Yoemem worldviews are
grounded in living with the universe and all of its
inhabitants, and not in a constant cycle of destruction,
greed and death.
Bad Subjects
language closely resembling that of the Aztecs. As a
result, they have been lumped together under a
classification the Spaniards referred to as Cahita,
which is closely linked to the Uto-Aztecan language.
They share this language with tribes to the south of
them, as well as with the Hopis in the Four Corners
region of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
14
Euro-Trash Vampires, Toothless
Kung-Fu Serfs, and Cinematic
Orientale Nouveau
Arturo J. Aldama
Age of Reason and Wolves
The current big-budget release French-subtitled film,
Brotherhood of the Wolf (Universal Focus 2002) or Le
Pacte des Loup, as it is known in France, revisits the
French legend of the Beast of Gevaudan. The beast
was allegedly responsible for the violent deaths of over
100 persons, mainly women and children, in the mid18th century during the reign of King Louis XV. In the
film directed by Christophe Gans, the Royal Court
responds to these killings in the French countryside by
sending Knight Gregoire de Fronsac (Samuel le Bihan),
a renowned “naturalist”, to find and capture the wolf
they believe is responsible for the vicious killings. With
the help of his “blood brother” Mani (played by Hawaiian martial artist Mark Dacascos), a Mohawk Indian
from colonized Canada who is skilled in spiritual
shaman techniques, de
Fronsac sets out
to hunt down the
beast.
As a cinematic
post(?)-colonial
text, Brotherhood attempts
to make a terse
critique on how
French colonial
violence in
Canada and in
Africa is naturalized by a twofold and recognizable trope:
the savagization
of non-Western peoples into either fierce or noble subhumans who belong to the “amoral” chaos of Nature
and who are in need of the “civilizing” powers of
colonization. The general and seemingly liberal or
“progressive” point that the film makes is that Western
civilization lofted by the seemingly transcendental
ideals of civility, rationality, and morality has been
bankrupted by an unmitigated male violence (that is
not seen as violence) against nature and her denizens,
namely wolves and indigenous peoples. However, this
romanticized and liberal gesture of condemning the
“savagery” of colonialism and finger-wagging at the
corrupt and arrogant French aristocracy and the
preponderance of toothless, filthy and illiterate serfs in
French society is undermined by its orientalist cinematic style, casting and plot motifs.
Le Pacte’s fight scenes and overall visual sense,
driven by a desire to be hip, stylish and hyper-kinetic
in the post-Tarantino sense, continues the Hollywood
and Parisian trend of co-opting the martial arts choreography of Hong Kong cinema. The best of Hong Kong
cinema— where fighting bodies become graceful
spectacles that bend time and space— before John
Woo was corrupted by the sexual binarism and predictable morality of the Hollywood West, has its origins
in the choreographic rigors of the opera training
schools of Peking. However, the choreographed hyperviolence in Brotherhood’s fight scenes becomes what I
term neo-orientalist kitsch. For example, the first
group fight scene shows dirty-faced French men,
dressed in women’s garb — to lure the beast who only
attacks peasant women and children — practice sloppy
simulations of Kung Fu stick fighting in the rainy
French countryside.
Laughable, yet these
scenes are done without
the intentional irony of
such films as A Knights
Tale (starring Heath
Ledger), where the joust
scenes with crowd singalongs where scored to
the music of Queen.
Although the kinetic
telescopic editing of the
“beast’s” pursuit is
visually captivating at
first, it is disturbing to
see how the mutilation
of buxom peasant
women is aestheticized,
glamorized and normalized. In several scenes,
the director’s forward angling of the shots where
women are the object of pursuit, together with the
sound effects of the beast and other aural atmospherics, make the audience live the director’s gaze through
the pursuit. The brutal slaughter and evisceration of
the wolves is also very painful to watch; and because
of its realism, it is hard to believe that animals were
not harmed during these scenes. The metaphorization
of these killings with French colonial expansion and the
killing of non-Western peoples functions well, especially in capturing French arrogance, disdain and thrill
for the hunt.
However, the narrative tropes that bind the form of
the film function on formulaic binaries. Mani, masquerading as a Cree-Mohawk, is paired with his “blood”
The beast, a CGI of medium-skill digital resolution,
moves in the hyper-kinetic frames akin to the fight
scenes of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. The beast is a
literal colonialist construction based on the fantasies
and fears of the Age of Reason concerning mythic
beasts that will swallow Civilization. Its predatory
and learned violence inadvertently metaphorizes the
rage of unleashed violence of domination and consumption intrinsic to the operations of colonial power.
The Matrix, an interesting meditation on virtual
reality, makes the orientalist co-optation of Asian fight
opera aesthetics in Hollywood cinema most famous.
The Matrix is the ultimate computer nerd revenge
fantasy. In the logic of the film, we are all virtual
beings engineered by corporate programmers. Those
who challenge the codes are disciplined by anti-viral
agents, white men with ear transmitters, dressed in
cheap Armani suits, and who feel no pain. However,
The Matrix appeals to those citizen-subjects who are
the most privileged consumers of high-tech global
capitalism. Its seemingly clever script on the interplay
of the virtual vs. the real in fact offers a profound
liberal escapist fantasy. The critical purchase made
through the adrenaline rush of Asian-style hyperviolence is one that disavows any type of social action
or agency. State, racial, sexual and imperialist violence
are really just virtual violence. The bleeding bodies of
those made abject by the state and its new global
order are just a series of visually effective binary
codes, and the hierarchic structure between consumer
and producer is just a programming code.
Miscegenating Vampires
October 2002
The current release of Queen of the Damned continues the trend of cinematic hyper-violence in a pastiche
of commercialized Goth culture that reveals Anne
Rice’s neocolonialist fear and fetish of Africa, Africans
in the “new world”, and her equation of blackness with
primal and unbridled violence. On an extant level,
Queen attempts to make a clever critique on the
commercialization of Goth rock and the spectacle of
Decolonizing French Cinema
concert violence by having the ancient master vampire, Lestat, re-awaken to become a top Goth rock cult
Although Gang’s colonialist rubrics and orientalizing figure. His music and its cryptic codes awaken Akasha
(the late Aaliyah), the Nubian queen of all vampires
tendencies are problematic, to say the least, and
undermine the liberal message of the film, recent
who also ruled Ancient Egypt with despotic violence.
trends in French cinema need to be applauded for
The problematic trope that Rice constructs between
pushing the envelope on sexuality and violence.
African diasporic cultural power in New Orleans and the
vampirism in the novel, Interview with a Vampire,
Further, they have continued the subversive antibourgeois goals of New Wave cinema in new spaces of which did not make it onto the film in any direct way,
aesthetic hybridity. For example, the recent trend
is fully developed in Queen with disturbing racial and
includes films that place women as the agents of their colonialist repercussions.
desire albeit violent and graphic, as seen in Romance
(1999) and Intimacy (2000), which is based on a
When Akasha awakens, even though she is conshort story of famed postcolonial British writer Hanif
structed as the mother of all vampires, she is perKureishi. Also, the controversial and iconoclastic
ceived as a threat to the social order of dominant white
Baise-Moi (Fuck Me) (2000) starring two “real life”
Euro-covens; they prefer remaining in the shadows of
porn stars, which culminates in a scene of graphic
Western civilization, surreptitiously feeding of their
gun sodomy and murder as revenge against rape and targets in dimly lit parks, alleyways and streets. Her
overall class rage, represents a collaboration between ungrateful and white supremacist offspring constantly
attack her. Older covens, many of aristocratic birth,
the Vietnamese Coralie Trinh-Thi and French Virginie
Despentes.
span generations; they observe the march of colonialism and capitalism and live for the fulfillment of their
hunger and needs. In a sense they are the ultimate
Even Luc Besson’s recent operatic urban thriller set
in modern day Paris, Kiss of the Dragon, makes
consumers in the feeding chain of capitalism. At the
credible use of Asian fight choreography to maintain a
15
The final showdown is between two French colonial
male subjects who act out their simulations of nonWestern peoples: Fronsac the white wannabe Cree,
and Jean Francois (Vincent Cassel), a French
nobleman’s son who simulates a Congolese type of
“cannibal.” His body is somewhat withered by what
they call “jungle rot” he caught in Africa. Their fight
scene between the “good” and the “bad” savage is
made even more ridiculous and offensive by their use
of orientalized stick fighting and their clunky imitations of Crouching Tiger moves.
stylish genre credibility. The cinematic fusion of
Western urban action and Chinese fight operatics is
further anchored by the charisma of mainland China
real-life fighter and super-star Jet Li. He alternates
between explosive fight acrobatics and the use of
acupuncture needles that he takes from his wrist-band
to calm, stop, and paralyze his opponents.
Bad Subjects
brother, a French naturalist who has gone “native”
but because of his knighthood becomes a type of
border-crosser between the French colonial bourgeoisie and its colonized natives. Mani embodies all the
stereotypes of the “noble savage” predominant in
Westerns, the quiet “wise” man who makes the
predictable palm-raised Tonto-like “hows” to the Lone
Ranger white hero. When Mani is killed, Fronsac
paints himself as a type of woodland warrior to
avenge his death. When he transforms himself into a
“white savage” with face paint, loincloth and tomahawk, he then is able to unleash the true “savagery”
of extreme, intense and unrelenting violence with an
orientalist twist. In a sense his “savage” costume
allows his Id to come out and play; he is no longer
bound by the Super-ego of civilization and its rule.
Within the logic of the film he becomes nature, raw
and unbridled.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
16
pinnacle of social privilege, they bring subjects into
their social circle and form alliances, much like upperechelon CEOs.
When Lestat breaks the code and becomes a public
figure, he fits the epitome of media lust and narcissism
of many mega-star musicians who thrive on being the
center of adulation cults. His groupies, who are young,
drugged women, do not however live to tell the tale of
their night of surrender. So when Akasha (the ancestral African queen of Egypt) awakens to claim Lestat as
her new King, he is both enthralled and threatened by
her sexual and creative force. The interplay of Lestat’s
whiteness with Akasha sets the key dramatic tension
of the film where Lestat is able to enunciate his whiteness, colonial privilege and seek his redemption by
resisting the “darkness” of the Queen. On a metaphoric
level, his struggles with “darkness” as the “prince of
darkness” are what White (Routledge, 1999) by
Richard Dyer skillfully illuminates:
Dark desires are part of the story of whiteness, but
as what the whiteness of whiteness has to struggle
against. Thus it is that the whiteness of white men
resides in the tragic quality of their giving way to
darkness and the heroism of channeling or resisting it.
In the dénouement of the film, Lestat realizes he
cannot possess or colonize Akasha and he refuses to
surrender his male and white authority, so Akasha is
set upon by Lestat and by a coven led by Maharet
(Lena Olin). The coven maliciously destroys Akasha;
they all encircle and feed from her in a scene of
symbolic matricide, one that mirrors the literal
violence of European colonization on African women’s
bodies. Maharet’s genealogy of Euro-western power
and tradition from the Old Country (eastern Europe)
that is embossed as a tree on the wall must be
protected at all costs. The film ends by restoring
whiteness, Western control, and protection against
miscegenation. The lineage of power among vampires
continues.
The message becomes that, yes, on a metaphorical
level they are descendents of African civilizations, but
white people and their ways of polite and cultured
violence are still superior to the primal blood of the
“wretched of the earth.”
_______________
Arturo Aldama <aaldama@asu.edu> is Associate Professor
of Ethnic Studies at Arizona State University and a member
of the Bad Subjects Collective.
Dario Argento’s Blood on the Walls
David Sanjek
The fifteen motion pictures produced by Italian filmmaker Dario Argento over the last thirty-five years
have given me a substantial and prolonged degree of
“guilty pleasure.” Yet they have simultaneously forced
me to engage with feelings and address ideas that I
would otherwise prefer to avoid or ignore.
To watch them is to encounter such graphic events
as these: A man falls down an empty elevator shaft
while his hands smoke as they drag along the hanging
cable. A woman collapses into a room filled with
barbed wire that tears her flesh apart as she struggles
to extricate herself. A young man is held forcibly in
place as an imperious woman jams a red high-heeled
shoe into his mouth. A woman’s car accidentally hits a
truck while, in slow motion, a piece of metal crashes
through the windshield and decapitates her. Attempting to drown a bag full of cats in Central Park, a
crippled man slips and is subsequently gnawed by rats,
only to have an anonymous man appear and hack him
to death with a cleaver. A homicidal rapist assaults a
prostrate woman and weaves a razor blade in and out
of his mouth with his tongue, threatening to cut her
flesh before he kills her.
As these striking scenes suggest, there is a disappearing line between realism and hallucination in
Argento films. His friend, renowned horror director
George Romero, said “I don’t think he’s the kind of guy
that dots the I’s or crossed the T’s.” Explicit motivation
plays only an occasional role in his plots, and charac-
ters behave on the basis of dramatic convenience
when their actions possess any deliberate cause at all.
Argento has observed, “We don’t solve mysteries in
real life. Why should we do it in films?”
Abandonment of ascertainable causality in Argento
plots extends to their physical settings. Mostly anonymous urban environments, they possess an unsettling
atmosphere such that the most peculiar actions
emerge as nothing extraordinary. Magic and the
mundane coexist without collision. Even the visual
design stretches the boundaries of the conventional.
Argento commonly indulges in a palette of bold,
primary colors and frequently lets brash red or blue
gels transform his characters’ features into comic
strip-like visages. His camera’s point of view has a
virtual mind of its own. Images are rarely stable. The
director’s mobile perspective weaves its way through
physical settings in a manner no human eye could
emulate, roving over roofs, across ceilings, and even
through a door’s keyhole as it accompanies a bullet’s
path to penetrate a character’s eye and pass out the
back of his head.
For all their admirable qualities, Argento’s films can
be repulsive and flat-out mind-numbing. Argento
possesses little interest in the petty details of our
daily lives, but lavishes all the technical powers at his
command to create cruel and audacious images of
extinction. “I like when people are disgusted, because
it means you’ve made an impression on them. A deep
Argento has routinely been dismissed as a mindless
misogynist, although he torments both genders in his
films. He does little to allay criticism when he blithely
asserts, “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If
they have a good face and figure, I would much
prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly
girl or man.” The truth of the matter is that Argento is
an equal opportunity abuser, both of his characters
and his audience. No one enters the zone of his
imagination without emerging unscathed.
This direction culminated in his first major work,
Deep Red (1975). Starring David Hemmings of
Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), it shares
with earlier films a fascination with the vicissitudes of
visual perception. Hemmings’s character observes a
vicious axe slaying, but afterwards cannot recall a
crucial detail about the crime scene. This focus on
cognition and the unreliability of memory can be traced
back to Sergio Leone, whose spaghetti westerns
frequently incorporated some past event whose impact
upon the characters was not clarified until the final
scene; for example, the meaning of Charles Bronson’s
harmonica in Once Upon A Time In The West. Leone
uses the device to tie up the messy pieces of his
convoluted plots, whereas in Argento’s hands the
practice amounts to yet one more demonstration of
life’s unavoidable instability and chaos. Even if we can
understand the events in our lives, the realization we
arrive at is at best shocking. and at worst lethal.
17
Bad Subjects
impression…” It is hard not to be disturbed by an
image like in Tenebrae (1982) when a woman’s hand
is severed and the arterial spray from it splatters a
blank white wall, a kind of sanguinary action painting.
Or when, in Opera (1987), a flock of ravens swoop
down upon a man and peck out his eye, after which
one of the birds pokes at the ambulatory organ as it
rolls about on the floor.
Giallo Career
Argento similarly feigns interest in the daily lives of
average individuals. There are very few families in his
films. Most characters exist in atomistic isolation from
one another, connected by acts of violence or memories of past injuries. In the feature films that followed
— Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Cat O’Nine Tails
(1970) and Four Flies On Grey Velvet (1971) —
Argento did not elaborate the giallo formula so much
as up the ante in criminal excess, making his killings
more elaborate and visually sumptuous.
Deep Red and the two films that followed also
initiated a striking musical dimension into Argento’s
work. The prolific composer Ennio Morricone had
scored his first three pictures, but Argento turned to
the Italian rock ensemble Goblin. Their insinuating
themes incorporate elements outside the realm of the
traditional soundtrack. Simple yet sophisticated
melodies employ a variety of distinctive sounds: bells,
drums, screams, disturbing whispers, and electronically modified material. The ominous presence of
Goblin’s work barrages an audience acoustically as well
as visually; the music plays virtually non-stop and at
deafening volumes. Argento drew on heavy metal to
accentuate what he felt to be some of the more brutal
elements in his narratives, as well as music from Brian
Eno and Phillip Glass.
October 2002
A box office success, the film typifies the popular
Italian genre known as the giallo film. Named for the
yellow covers of popular paperback crime novels, the
form combines the customary elements of a detective
story with operatically excessive serial killings. It can
be traced to the pioneering Italian genre director,
Mario Bava (1914-80). His ground-breaking 1964
feature Blood and Black Lace pays a kind of flatfooted attention to its blackmail plot set in a fashion
salon, but lavishes a painterly dedication to detail on
the mechanics of carnage during a number of brutal
murders. Police assigned to the case fail to solve the
crimes, which only come to an end when the perpetrators kill one another in a fit of jealousy. For Bava,
social routine is void of interest. Only the most lethal
expressions of human nature merit his attention and
artistic focus.
The fundamental inexplicability of existence led
Argento temporarily to abandon the giallo form for his
next two features, Suspiria (1976) and Inferno (1980).
Here, supernatural forces behind the mayhem, malign
female deities that manipulate laws of physical nature
in order to dominate and destroy the lives of protagonists. Stepping outside the framework of causal logic
allowed Argento to unleash the depths of his imagination. Sequences in these films drift from one to another like some kind of fevered hallucination. Death
can come literally out of nowhere, without warning or
discernable motive. Even the very elements appear to
possess sinister properties. In Inferno water demonstrates no cleansing properties, but often conceals
evidence of the activities of diabolic agents. At one
point, a female character has to lower herself into an
underground pool in order to locate a lost key, only to
uncover rotting corpses and the drifting evidence of
some former inhabitants. The plot lines of both
Suspiria and Inferno resemble macabre variants of
fairy tales without a happy ending. Protagonists seem
child-like innocents who survive less by skill or superior knowledge, rather more by the whims of fate. Evil
may be temporarily quelled in these films, but little
sense of closure comforts the audience.
Argento was born into the film industry. His father
was a public relations executive at Unitalia, the
government organization that promoted cinema
export, and his mother was a popular photographer of
film personalities. Uninterested in higher education,
Argento sought employment as a film critic following
high school graduation. He gained access to the
industry when he co-wrote the screen story for Sergio
Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon A Time In The West
(1968), along with the celebrated director Bernardo
Bertolucci. This led Argento to write a number of
screenplays in a variety of genres before his first film,
The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, was released in
1969.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
18
The bulk of Argento’s films over the last two decades
have been in the giallo mold, although he returned to
the combination of supernatural and human horror in
Phenomena (1984). This nearly unwatchable stew of
disparate elements tossed together paranormal communication with insects, a predatory mass murderer, a
razor-wielding ape, and a deformed maniacal child.
Opera and Tenebrae, as well as Trauma (1993), The
Stendahl Syndrome (1996) and his most recent
release Sleepless (2000), are traditional gialli. From
the first, Argento has written his own scripts, yet
succumbed with dire results to the temptation of
literary adaptation. He drafted various themes from
Edgar Allan Poe in his section of Two Evil Eyes, a
feature he co-directed with George Romero in 1989,
and released a disastrous version of Gaston Leroux’s
famous Phantom of the Opera (1998).
Considering the number of times he has used a
generic model, one can argue that Argento is either
notably consistent in his repetition of themes or
notably uninventive. Whatever the case, he has
unquestionably embellished a particular corner of the
horror genre. Argento’s films are popular across the
globe, yet seldom receive critical or commercial
plaudits in the United States. Nothing since Suspiria
has been released widely. Until recently, even when
Argento’s movies were available on videotape or other
formats, the contents were routinely altered. Americans had to turn to the black market to obtain bootlegs
of the European prints if they wanted to view Argento’s
original work.
violator becomes the violated and then transfers his
role to another, conveys an uncanny chill. By the
final sequence, the words quoted at the start have
become more disturbing as they appear to be an
autobiographical statement by Neal of his own homicidal psychosis.
It is the manner in which this film coils back upon
itself and makes one question the very nature of
story-telling and the impact it gains by transgressing
expectations that makes Argento worth time and
attention. Notwithstanding killer chimpanzees, countless good-looking corpses, and virtual abandonment
of motivational complexity, the work of Dario Argento
remains with an audience irrespective of their wishes.
In Violence in the Arts, Canadian scholar John
Fraser asks “Why it is that some violences seem to
make for intellectual clarity and a more civilized
consciousness, while others make for confusion?”
Argento promotes both conditions. His willful disregard of sensibilities and frequent use of shock for its
own sake jolts nervous systems, but little more. On
the other hand, the self-reflexive narrative complexities of Tenebrae – which can be found elsewhere,
most notably in Opera and The Stendahl Syndrome –
confront the manner in which extreme forms of art
can overwhelm both those who create and consume
them. Fraser suggests that “It is in violent encounters, however, that one is required most obviously to
reaffirm or reassess one’s own values and to acknowledge the necessity of having as strong and clearly
articulated a value-system, as sharply defined a self,
Tenebrae and Autobiography
Tenebrae, recently released in a DVD version,
embodies the best of the director and evidences that he is not simply a feckless purveyor of cheap thrills and gory effects. The
protagonist is a crime novelist, Peter Neal
(Anthony Franciosa), who might be regarded as
a stand-in for Argento as a purveyor of similar
scenarios. Neal’s work instigates a spree of
vicious killings in Rome, where the writer is on
a book tour. The culprit leaves torn-out pages
of his inspiration as evidence. Argento begins
the film with a voice-over reading from Neal’s
book: “The impulses had become irresistible.
There was only one answer to the fury that
tormented him. And so he committed his first
act of murder. He had broken the most deeprooted taboo and found not guilt, not anxiety or
fear, but freedom. Every humiliation that stood
in his way could be swept away by the simple act of
annihilation: murder.”
This equation of liberation with annihilation points to
Argento’s repeated argument that his films do not
engage in senseless violence, but instead liberate
inhibited domains of human imagination. However,
that equation becomes ever more complicated when
the killings continue after the murderer is killed, and
Neal proves to be not only the culprit of that crime but
others as well. He skillfully uses the cover of the mass
killings to exterminate his wife and her lover, his
editor. The circular logic of the film’s plot, where the
as much alertness to others, and as firm a will as
possible.” Argento lays bare the potentially tenuous
nature of that value-system and the threats to it, but
equally reinforces that foundation and allows it to
continue to exist.
_______________
David Sanjek <DSanjek@BMI.com> is a film &
book reviewer for
<http://www.popmatters.com>. He is
completing a collection of essays AlwaysOn My
Mind: Music, Memory and Money (Wesleyan
University Press, 2003).
Leanne McRae
“I come to you in friendship...well alright, seething
hatred”
— Spike, in “Pangs” episode
I have recently begun to think about men. I had
heard they are in trouble. I began this thought
process while watching an overtly feminist text,
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.
Both producers and viewers relish the polysemic
potential of television. For industry executives this
means a wide scope for interpretation and therefore
larger demographics. This quality enables television to
act as a social litmus paper — gauging, measuring,
and informing social movement and meanings. John
Hartley calls it “the bardic function,” the ability of
television texts to articulate and comment on concerns
and issues within a culture. Television is a crucible — a
bubbling cauldron of conflicting ideas that mobilize a
series of struggles over meaning. In this way, Buffy:
The Vampire Slayer is most obviously a product of its
time.
Spike articulates the contradictory and problematic
masculine identity that is embodied by many men
within our culture. In doing so Spike’s character
traces the manner in which television is a site where
hegemony can be unmasked and struggle visualized,
lending legitimation to subordinated identities.
Buffy’s awesome arse-kicking ability sits comfortably with my aggressive feminist tendencies. However, I always liked the playful personality of Spike,
the resident evil vampire played by American actor
James Marsters. Spike delivers the best lines. Indeed,
Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy: The Vampire
Slayer, has distinguished the show through sharp
dialogue peppered with self-reflexive wit and
intertextual humor. The razor-like insights of Spike’s
dialogue shape him as a worthy foil and folly to
Buffy’s physical prowess. As a result, he embodies a
contradictory masculinity that embraces a series of
complicated issues encircling the current ‘crisis in
masculinity.’ He is a conundrum. Simultaneously
empowered and disempowered, Spike is forced to
redefine his identity outside traditional masculine
power. With Buffy colonizing the space of male
legitimacy, Spike is persistently problematized within
the Buffy universe.
Some television programs enter into serious and
vibrant debate among audiences, before, during and
after their consumption. These engagements extend
the life of television programs and inject vitality into
cultural products. Henry Jenkins has used Star Trek to
demonstrate the ways in which television fans appropriate and re-inscribe the meanings within televisual
texts in vibrant and resistive ways through textual
poaching. Viewers frequently do not conform to
mainstream reading expectations mapped out by
market projections. They will mobilize a plethora of
reading strategies that will embrace, reject and negotiate dominant social frameworks.
19
Bad Subjects
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Male Defeat
Televisual Truths
Spike: “I just like them, they make me feel
all…manly.”
— from “School Hard” episode
Television is predominantly framed by discourses
that function to define meanings in support of dominant structures and the empowered groups that
benefit from them. The medium is embedded within
the processes of social sense-making and therefore
resonates powerfully within our culture. Television
rarely confines itself to the box. It spills beyond its
electronic boundaries in ways that often do not follow
distinct patterns or rules.
The problem with writing for television is that it goes
out of date very quickly. Market forces change with
social attitudes, and on the cutting edge of these
changes are television executives hoping to catch the
next social tide. The increasing visibility of competent
women within the media has begun to coincide with
‘real’ changes in women’s lives. There is a clear
October 2002
Buffy: “Do we really need weapons for this?”
October 2002
Bad Subjects
20
trajectory from Wonder Woman and Emma Peel
through Clarice Starling, Sarah Connor and Agent
Scully, and onto Xena, Captain Kathryn Janeway, Buffy
and now Max from Dark Angel. These women are
products of three broad feminist movements that have
spanned over a century.
The changing representations of men within the
medium have a shorter time-line. Most obviously,
when the concerns of a dominant group in a society
need to be articulated it takes less time for these to
gain space and legitimacy within a culture. The visualization of a contradictory masculine identity has had
vague origins in Special Agent Dale Cooper, Captain
Benjamin Sisko, and Fox Mulder. Buffy: The Vampire
Slayer is, however, perhaps the first popular text to
engage in a persistent questioning and deconstruction
of male power within our society. This is no doubt a
part of its narrative structure. For Buffy to be the hero,
the men around her must be largely incompetent. It is
Spike who embodies this conundrum most powerfully
within the diegesis.
Embodying Power
“We like to talk big, vampires do. ‘I’m going to take
over the world’. That’s just tough-guy talk. Strut
around with your friends over a pint of blood. The
truth is — I like this world. You’ve got dog racing,
Manchester United…and you’ve got people. Billions of
people walking around like Happy Meals with legs.
It’s alright here.”
— Spike, in “Becoming” episode
Men consistently and visibly occupy the public
sphere, where the currency of male power is articulated and traded. This is a realm in which things of
value are created, built and exchanged. It is here that
men are able to demonstrate a mastery of control.
However, their capacity to embody power effectively is
tethered to a series of difficult and contradictory roles.
Men must be strong, intelligent, brave, resilient and
powerful. They are finding it increasingly hard to fit
this straightjacket of legitimate masculine identity.
Specifically, they find it difficult to be empowered
within a hierarchy of masculinity in which different
versions of manhood are afforded divergent currencies
of power. Masculine empowerment is being questioned
within our culture now that those at the apex of this
hierarchy find their roles under threat. White, middle
class, heterosexual men are struggling to maintain
their legitimacy in light of serious challenges to it not
only from women, but also from other men. Within
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer the relationship between
Buffy and Spike articulates this process.
Spike arrives in Sunnydale in the “School Hard”
episode, screened at the beginning of the second
season. In this episode, he drives his car over the
‘Welcome to Sunnydale’ sign and emerges accompanied by a suitable Metallica-like soundtrack trailing
after his big-booted, leather-jacketed, blonde-haired
frame. With his reputation for having killed two Slayers
in the past, he approaches the local leader of the
Sunnydale vampires — “the anointed one” — and
proposes to eliminate Buffy. When he attacks during
the school PTA meeting, Buffy’s mother Joyce foils his
attack by hitting him with an axe. This is Spike’s first
moment of disempowerment; however, he quickly
and effectively compensates by citing the difficulties
of annihilating a “slayer with friends and family” and
then killing “the anointed one” to claim his position at
the head of the vampire community.
Later in the season, at the conclusion of the “What’s
My Line” episode, Buffy gravely wounds Spike. He
becomes confined to a wheelchair and forced to
negotiate a disempowered subjectivity, further
complicated by the reanimation of his girlfriend
Druscilla’s power and the return of his ‘sire’ or fatherfigure, Angelus. Spike slips down within the masculine
hierarchy to occupy a significantly marginalized
position. He can only reclaim that power when he
gains control over his body and is able to reoccupy
the public sphere with legitimate mastery and control.
Men’s bodies are at the center of their capacity to
mobilize power within our culture. On embodied
surfaces men demonstrate their competence over
themselves and the social sphere. The phallus locates
the capacity to carry this power. It is a symbol not
closely related to the mere possession of a penis, but
rather to the magical power that comes from and
extends to an ability to occupy space with legitimacy.
Embodied competence functions to signify wider social
power. In this way the capacity to exert control over
one’s own body, as well as other bodies, signifies the
epitome of masculine authority. This hegemonic
authority can be exerted by subtle means within the
workplace, enabling middle-class managers and
supervisors to gain authority, or it can function more
overtly in the form of physical violence.
For men, physical violence activates a fragile line
between restraint and rage. It is the medium through
which they may simultaneously gain and lose control.
By acting violently on other bodies they discover and
reaffirm the limits of their own. Through violence men
are able to maintain control. Control can be used as a
focus for the frustration of ‘crisis’ in masculine identity. A man who is able to mobilize a violently controlled consciousness demonstrates a competence
over his self that possesses cultural value.
The fact that Buffy defeats Spike — thus demonstrating superior control over her body — makes it
difficult for Spike to occupy public space in a legitimate manner. Being confined to a wheelchair limits
the demonstration of embodied competence. He is
only able to reclaim that empowerment when the
“Becoming” episode reveals that he can indeed walk
and was simply biding his time to eliminate Angelus.
Spike does so by bludgeoning him with a pipe; in that
moment, he is able to rearticulate his embodied
control, and consequently, his phallic power.
This power is mobilized more potently in the
“Lover’s Walk” episode when Spike returns to
Sunnydale, having broken up with Druscilla. Once
again he drives over the ‘Welcome to Sunnydale’ sign,
although this time he tumbles out of his car in a
“Now that was fun. Oh don’t tell me that wasn’t
fun? God it’s been so long since I had a decent spot
of violence…It really puts things into
perspective…I’ve been all wrong-headed about this.
Weepin’, crawlin’, blaming everybody else. I want
Dru back I just gotta be the man I was - the man
she loved. I’m gonna do what I should’ve done in
the first place. I’ll find her, wherever she is, tie her
up, torture her, until she likes me again.”
— Spike, in “Lover’s Walk” episode
In the fifth season of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer,
Spike has continued to occupy a chimeric position
within the diegesis. Constantly moving within different
meaning systems, this season has seen Spike reluctantly fall in love with Buffy. He is able to embody a
range of subjectivities that serve to redefine his power
and position an innovative identity that is not concerned with reclaiming a mythological existence based
on idealized versions of masculinity, but is able to exist
alongside conflicting identities around him.
In the final episode of this season Spike reconciles
his crisis in a scene with Buffy where he tells her, “I
know you never loved me, I know I’m a monster. But
you treated me like a man…” The re-negotiation of his
power serves to create a matrix of discursive practice
where his identity can exist coherently regardless of
whether it fits dominant meaning systems. He is able
to move beyond conventional masculine structures to
create a dynamic identity that can negotiate social
changes without shifting into crisis mode. Spike is a
productive character who works through the difficulties
of masculinity and reconciles them within larger social
formations.
Ruptured Manhood
Spike embodies and challenges the current ‘crisis in
masculinity’. Unable to effectively embrace the social
ideals of manhood, he finds himself having to renegotiate what it means to be a man. A diversity of
masculine subjectivities is mobilized around and
through Spike as he comes to terms with challenges
to his power.
It is on our television screens where radical reinterpretations of gendered identity are finding their most
current manifestation. Television’s bardic function
provides space for the articulation of contemporary
concerns on issues that affect a variety of empowered
and disempowered groups.
_______________
Leanne MacRae is at the School of Media, Communication and
Culture, Murdoch University,
Perth, Western Australia
October 2002
These alternatives must be available for men to
embrace more flexible identities that can move
beyond conventional meaning systems. Through this
movement, deeper and significant social changes can
be affected whereby a diversity of identities can
occupy positions of power within a society. For Spike
the ultimate challenge to his authority comes with the
implant. Being unable to bite literally and metaphorically castrates him. He is no longer a threat to Buffy;
nor does he possess power over her gang. This
manifests in a depression in which he attempts to
stake himself. Within this personal narrative, Spike
role-plays some of the very real concerns that affect
men in the world today.
Through television, contemporary masculine ideologies and male identities are being visualized. The
benefit of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is that it provides
a site through which a variety of groups can negotiate
a whole series of social changes. Not only is Spike
redefining male power, but this process is creating
space for reinterpretations of women’s power as well
as alternative sexual identities. Spike is opening a
terrain within the polysemy of television texts, one
that enables men within our culture to embrace
alternative subjectivities without the associated crisis.
In this way the social commentary found within this
text frames wider social actions.
21
Spike gains restoration of his empowerment only
after this violent interlude. However, despite reaffirming dominant masculine power structures, Buffy’s
presence within the space he should normally occupy
means that this process of negotiation is constant.
Spike must be remarkably self-reflexive in order to
rearticulate his competence while it is simultaneously
challenged. In “Lover’s Walk” Spike embraces a
difficult subjectivity that moves beyond conventional
masculine ideologies. While he mobilizes violence in
very predictable ways to reclaim his sense of self, he
also acknowledges his vulnerability by confronting
Buffy and Angel, claiming, “I may be love’s Bitch, but
at least I’m man enough to admit it.” Spike is a
moving metonym for the masculine hierarchy and its
‘othered’ masculine identities. This process reaches its
climax in the fourth season when his corporeality is
significantly and permanently altered by a brain
implant that restricts his ability to feed on or harm
human beings.
Given the significant restructuring of the workforce in
the post-war period, an entire generation of men has
been forced to negotiate their identities in new ways
using less accessible skills. Their idealized identity
relies inherently on a capacity to provide for the family
unit through demonstration of embodied competence
in the workplace, which now has been narrowed via
corporate downsizing and increased part-time and
contract labor. These concerns are at the core of the
current crisis in masculinity. Spike is providing a
popular culture site where this re-negotiation is being
played out. He is positioning a revolutionary masculinity that is contradictory and hybrid in its mobilization
of diverse identity politics.
Bad Subjects
drunken stupor. He is out of control. Devastated by
Druscilla’s rejection, complaining that “she didn’t even
have the decency to cut my head off,” the lovelorn,
melancholic Spike returns to his pathological self
through his fists. A street fight involving Buffy, a
restored Angel, and former members of Spike’s
vampire gang renews his sense of hope.
22
Falling Down: Social Contracts and
October 2002
Bad Subjects
the Logic of the Absurd
Justin Shaw
Since its release in the year following the 1992 Los
Angeles race riots, Joel Schumacher’s film Falling
Down has become the subject of much political debate
for its portrayal of a socially-disenfranchised white
man, “D-Fens” (Michael Douglas) who reacts violently
against a politically-correct society. This film raises the
question of the nature of a filmic social contract with
its audience and its contribution to a film’s political
appeal. Does Falling Down merely pander to a reactionary, right-wing sentiment in its audience, or is
there a more complex exchange taking place between
film and spectator?
Films often operate as a form of social contract by
challenging our moral and empathic capacity as
spectators. Through its peculiar mixture of violence,
humour and social critique, Falling Down tests our
ability to empathise with victims of the violence
perpetrated by its central character. In this way, the
film asks its audience to resecure the social bond
threatened by a humorous and detached portrayal of
anti-social violence within the urban setting of Los
Angeles. As someone who draws a level of audience
sympathy through the identifiable problems that he
encounters in his journey across Los Angeles, D-Fens
turns the social contract of Falling Down into a test of
whether we can reverse these allegiances by
empathising with the victims of his violence. As an
ordinary person confronted by ordinary, everyday
problems, it is D-Fens’ extraordinary and violent
response to frustration that makes him a questionable
source of audience identification.
Smashing Donuts and Postmodern Capitalism
The first instance of D-Fens’ violence occurs as a
result of his altercation with a Korean shopkeeper.
After being bluntly informed by the shopkeeper that he
must buy something in order to receive change, DFens eventually decides upon a can of Coke. When he
discovers the cost of the Coke, however, he realises he
will not have enough change left to make the call.
There follows haggling over the price of the Coke, at
which point the shopkeeper reaches for a baseball bat.
A struggle over the bat ensues, during which a jar of
American flags gets knocked to the floor. Upon disarming the shopkeeper, D-Fens is taken aback by his
suggestion that he “take the money.” “I’m not the
thief,” he retorts “I’m not the one charging eighty-five
cents for a stinking soda!” Claiming that he is merely
“standing up for his rights as a consumer”, D-Fens
then proceeds from aisle to aisle, smashing every
product he believes overpriced. Eventually he returns
to the can of Coke, which the terrified shopkeeper now
‘reduces’ to the value of fifty cents. D-Fens accepts the
price, calmly places his money in the cash register
and removes his change. He then departs, leaving
behind him a stunned shopkeeper and a damaged
shop.
Part of the social danger posed by such a scene is
the way it objectifies the target of D-Fens’ anger
through a perverse kind of black humour. As D-Fens
acts out a personal war on exorbitant prices, his
violence is afforded a blackly comical logic in the way
he is shown to enquire about the price of each item in
turn before he proceeds to smash it with the baseball
bat:
D-Fens: “Donuts, package of six, how much?
Shopkeeper: “Dollar twelve.”
D-Fens: “Too much.” (smashes product)
The darkly humorous nature of this exchange between customer and shopkeeper — with its play on
postmodern consumer anxieties — is highlighted at
the moment where the shopkeeper, after witnessing
various items being destroyed, ventures a false price
in the hope that the particular product will be spared.
Rather than empathise with the shopkeeper, the film
invites its audience to distance themselves from his
plight through laughter.
As an attack on wider economic processes of
globalisation and inflation, D-Fens’ destruction of the
Korean’s store makes the audience accountable in a
manner distinct from the anarchistic comedy tradition
of cinema to which the scene (at least indirectly)
refers. The convenience store scene from Falling
Down combines a comical transgression of societal
restraints and conventions — in this case, the antisocial destruction of a corner store — with an appeal
for social change by “turning back prices to 1965.”
This use of humour for social critique can be compared with that of the anarchistic comedy genre, as
exemplified by Marx Brothers films, in which antisocial destruction that creates laughter does not
represent an attempt to change the social status quo.
Given the twisted logic behind his actions, the fact
that D-Fens is able to appeal to an earlier, preinflationary period of American history as a rationale
for such violence suggests an alternative to the social
status quo that is being offered. D-Fens displaces his
rage at globalisation, economic recession and profiteering by food conglomerates on a small Korean
neighbourhood shop. This shop thus becomes a site
upon which a wider threat to the social contract needs
to be rectified by the spectator through a feeling of
empathy for the victimised shopkeeper. The film, in
turn, turns this ability to empathise into a moral
struggle by inviting a humorous response to the
Korean’s plight.
In Falling Down, D-Fens assumes the clownish role of
an outsider who questions society’s values and disrupts its everyday activities at a time of apparent
economic and social crisis. At one point, D-Fens argues
with a construction worker over some street repairs
that are causing traffic chaos. This leads to him exposing the corruption of a
construction company
“fixing” a street so it can
“justify its inflated budgets.”
Later, after an elderly golfer
deliberately hits a ball at him
when he passes through an
exclusive golf course, D-Fens
points out the obscenity of
having acres of parkland
restricted to a “bunch of old
men driving around in little
cars.” In both these instances, the coherence of DFens’ criticisms plays against
a farcical look at “the world”
of the film. Our distance
from the viewed object
enables us to see the “truth”
in D-Fens’ arguments. Yet it
is also this distance that
threatens our moral function
as spectator in relation to DFens’ acts of violence.
Falling Down issues its
social challenge as a challenge to empathise with an
object of violence that is represented as “not fully
real”. Having revealed the unnecessary nature of the
street repairs, D-Fens proceeds to blow up the construction site with a rocket launcher that he produces
from his bag of weapons. As a heightened moment of
excess, this violent solution to traffic chaos can be
seen to invite a level of viewer support by the way it is
October 2002
Plays on humour and complex
processes of identification in
Falling Down represent both a
threat to the social contract and
the source of its possible restoration. In the course of his
journey, D-Fens is able to
acquire an assortment of weapons from his various assailants,
including a Hispanic gang and a
neo-Nazi. These weapons
become a means of expressing
social disenchantment through
force. When a fast-food restaurant refuses D-Fens a
late breakfast, he produces a gun in order to get his
way. Given the serious and threatening nature of such
an act, what is most interesting about this scene is
the manner in which D-Fens’ threat is reduced, at
least for the film audience, through the darkly comical
nature of proceedings.
Violent Farce and Moral Spectatorship
23
Our struggle to bridge the emotional gap of
spectatorship created by Falling Down can be understood as an attempt to re-establish the social bond
that includes an ability to empathise with the pain and
suffering of others. Without trying to account for the
multiplicity of possible audience reactions to the
convenience store scene, it is important to understand the kinds of responses that are being asked
from the audience through the film’s comical play on
violence. In the midst of uneasy self-consciousness
when asked to laugh at the plight of the Korean
shopkeeper, the spectator of
Falling Down is forced to revert
from an “innocent bystander” to
a complicit and (potentially)
guilty agent whose laughter
represents another kind of
violence inflicted on the Korean
through a failure of empathy.
Faced with this feeling of guilt,
the spectator must, therefore,
strive towards a more “appropriate”, moral response in order to
secure the social bond of empathy.
In a manner comparable to the destruction of the
convenience store, our position in relation to D-Fens is
significantly different to that of the other people in the
restaurant. Unlike the restaurant customers and staff,
we know or at least suspect, that D-Fens’ intention is
not to harm anyone. The customers’ terrified looks
therefore appear in a somewhat absurd and comical
light. When D-Fens describes a female customer’s
terrified vomiting as a sign of dissatisfaction with her
meal, the viewer is cued to laugh. Similarly, when DFens’ gun accidentally fires into the ceiling, the heightening of fear amongst customers and staff is matched
by a heightening of black comedy as D-Fens apologetically tries to explain that the gun “has a very sensitive
trigger.” A laugh response to D-Fens’ actions is something that the audience must work to overcome in
order to remedy threats to the social contract that
such actions pose. In this way, Falling Down turns a
challenge to the dominant social order into a restoration of that order via audience response.
Bad Subjects
Falling Down’s mixture of comical and anarchistic
violence with a voice of dissent can be distinguished
from the social transgressions of the anarchistic
comedy, where a repressive, social order is momentarily subverted in favour of an unarticulated and
utopian order of anarchic freedom. The promise of
anarchic freedom posed by anarchistic comedies such
as those of the Marx Brothers represents a transitory
and socially-acceptable moment of release that an
audience does not take seriously. In the convenience
store scene from Falling Down, D-Fens’ call for social
change poses a serious challenge to our ability as
spectators to supply a moral and empathic gaze to a
farcical vision of society. The controlled moment of
social release created by anarchistic comedy becomes
an uncontrolled threat to the social contract that
needs to be rectified within the social domain of the
audience.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
24
sanitised and down-played through humour: a small
black child, believing the action to be part of a movie,
shows D-Fens how to aim and shoot the weapon. In a
similar play on farce, the firing of the weapon is
presented as a comical accident, with D-Fens’ accidentally pressing the trigger as he lowers the gun.
The serious and “real” nature of the violence is
sanitised via its representation as a comical accident.
When the street explodes in flames and workers
scurry for cover, viewers must supply the moral look
that is absent from a comical vision of anti-social
violence. The empathic distance associated with a
laugh response needs to be bridged by a moral act of
spectatorship.
A similar kind of farcical detachment determines our
response to D-Fens’ encounter with elderly golfers.
After nearly being hit by a golf ball, D-Fens angrily
fires his gun at the golfers’ cart. This action creates a
two-fold effect: the golf cart rolls into a lake and the
golfer who hit the ball suffers a heart attack. As a
result of the play on simultaneous actions, the
situation’s severity diffuses in favour of a comical turn
of events: the ailing golfer’s live-saving pills happen
to be in the cart that disappears in the lake. Again,
the social bond of empathy is brought into question
when we must struggle to empathise with a dying
man who is shown to “deserve” his fate.
In this and other instances, Falling Down forces a
contractual response from spectators by creating a
feeling of moral ambivalence and unease in relation to
a comical look at a dying man. We are the ones who
must restabilise the social contract by empathising
with the victim of D-Fens’ violence. In order to do
this, we must overcome the feeling of emotional
under-involvement that allows us to appreciate the
comical absurdity, voiced by D-Fens, of a man dying
while “wearing a stupid-looking hat.”
Humour, as a rejection of empathic identification
with the viewed object, represents the means by
which Falling Down challenges moral and empathic
responsibility. Rather than ask its audience to share,
in an unproblematic sense, the reactionary point of
view of its central character, Falling Down uses that
point of view to force its audience into recreating the
social contract threatened by D-Fens’ words and
actions. The conservative politics that has been
attached to the film thus needs to be recognised as
part of the wider strategy by which Falling Down is
able to mobilise its audience as moral and social
agents for change.
_______________
Justin Shaw teaches in the Cinema Studies program at the
University of Melbourne, Australia. He recently completed a
dissertation on “Melodrama, Social Spectatorship and the
Modern Social Problem Film.”
Rafagazos de imágenes:
jóvenes y violencia en relatos
fílmicos de Medellín
Juana Suárez
Rodrigo D: no futuro (1989) y La vendedora de
rosas (1998) del director colombiano Víctor Gaviria y
La virgen de los sicarios (2000) del director francés
Barbet Schroeder suceden en Medellín. Estas tres
producciones representan algunas de las
consecuencias de la economía del narcotráfico en la
juventud, enfatizando particularmente el entorno
violento de la periferia de Medellín y la manera cómo
confluyen diferentes estéticas e ideologías de la
violencia importadas a través de la industria del
entretenimiento. Aquí el cine no es alegoría de la
realidad nacional, sino que la constituye y emerge
como mecanismo de resistencia a la cultura
hegemónica. Las vidas de los jóvenes retratados no
son una abstracción de la realidad sino una muestra
concreta del impacto de las violencias en los mismos.
la globalización y el neoliberalsimo han dejado en las
ciudades latinoamericanas. La sensación de progreso
que ofrece la ciudad, frecuentemente hace ignorar el
espacio marginal visitado por la cámara de Gaviria y,
algunas veces, por la de Schroeder. Estos lugares
marginales muestran la disolución del flujo de capital
tanto económico como cultural y la descorporeización
del espacio dentro de la agresiva economía global. La
cocaína, sin duda, ha participado en flujos económicos
transnacionales. Particularmente en la década de los
ochenta, su carácter ilegal obligaba a lavar el dinero y
a camuflarlo en farmacias, industrias de ropa y
calzado, establecimientos de diversión y servicio que,
sino eran destruidos por atentados, aparecían o
desaparecían según la necesidad de los empresarios,
evidenciando una economía sostenida por la idea del
simulacro.
Medellín es un sólido y moderno centro industrial
donde se constrasta el trabajo arduo de habitantes
emprendedores con el ambiente ficticio y glorioso que
En la producción de Gaviria, la cámara apunta a
establecer una cartografía de la ciudad que incluya a
Medallo (la ciudad delito, la del alias) en Medellín,
25
desde La vendedora de rosas
sociedad a través de la letra de sus canciones. Sin
embargo, la presencia de parafernalia punk (telas de
uniforme, indumentaria militar, zapatos industriales, el
famoso mohawk, por ejemplo) es precaria. En el caso
del punk en Medellín, este ha sido apropiado y
desmantelado de sus significados originales para crear
un espacio de negociación entre la división de lo
moderno y lo posmoderno que caracteriza las violentas
culturas heterogéneas de América Latina.
October 2002
Mientras que la población juvenil retratada en
Rodrigo D pertenece al período álgido del
narcoterrorismo, los jóvenes representados en La
vendedora pertenecen a una generación que ha
recibido directamente el impacto de la violencia de esa
década. La presencia del dinero del narcotráfico y de la
sombra dejada por la Ley del Padre, envestida en
Pablo Escobar Gaviria, es latente. En forma
contradictoria, este narcotraficante mostraba
preocupación por mejorar la calidad de vida de las
comunas de Medellín de donde provenían los sicarios.
El narcotraficante invertía dinero en la construcción de
pequeñas casas de ladrillo con servicio de
alcantarillado y electricidad, mejoraba la condición de
las escuelas y frecuentemente sus trabajadores
repartían productos alimenticios básicos, dejando una
suerte de aura de Robin Hood Criollo con sus
paradójicas acciones. La distancia temporal entre las
dos producciones (9 años) muestra la manera cómo se
agravó la descomposición social en la ciudad. En esta
producción, hay un mayor desplazamiento de la
cámara de las comunas a la ciudad y viceversa.
Mónica, la protagonista, intenta organizar una fiesta
para celebrar la Navidad e integrar a su “parche”
Rodrigo D es la historia de un grupo de pistolocos
de las comunas de Medellín. La principal ocupación
de pistolocos y sicarios (jóvenes asesinos a sueldo
conocidos como asesinos de las motos) era el crimen
pagado por los grandes mafiosos y el consumo de
bazuco, cigarrillos de pasta de cocaína mezclada con
otros residuos químicos. El punk en esta película
transmite no sólo el vértigo de la temporalidad de la
vida de estos jóvenes, su sentimiento frenético y
sentido de alienación, sino que contextualiza la
fracción urbana donde se asentaron los sicarios como
un mundo dominado por el consumo de
estupefacientes y las letras nihilistas del punk y el
hard core. Las letras de las canciones, como
intertextos de la narrativa, acentúan el callejón sin
salida en el cual esta porción de la juventud está
atrapada. “No futuro” es el nombre de una de las
pandillas de sicarios y es una frase que se convierte
en una metáfora para la falta de esperanza y
alternativas de la juventud. Gaviria hace uso del lema
de la cultura punk británica para ofrecer una
connotación de cómo la condición posmoderna ha sido
asumida en estos fragmentos de la sociedad
latinoamericana. Los temas musicales de la banda
sonora son punk producido en Medellín en los años 80
y su presencia en la película enfatiza tanto la
marginalización como la violencia urbana. Aquí el
punk obviamente se relaciona con la forma cómo fue
entendido y apropiado por los sicarios y pistolocos en
Medellín como una manifestación de ideología
contracultural; se expresaba así oposición a los
Aparatos Ideológicos del Estado, adoptando un estilo
punk en la vestimenta, los símbolos anticristianos, los
rituales satánicos y una crítica descarnada de la
Bad Subjects
obligando a un tránsito del corazón de la metrópoli a
las colinas donde pulularon las comunas. Su
producción reafirma la presencia de estos jóvenes y
les confiere visibilidad, desafiando la borradura que
se ampara en la designación
de “desechable” que se les ha
dado tanto en Medellín como
en otras ciudades del país.
Para la composición de sus
guiones, Gaviria utiliza un
procedimiento similar al de la
narrativa testimonial: la
grabación de relatos de los
jóvenes de las comunas y
otros sectores marginales de
Medellín en el espacio que
ellos habitan. Muchos de ellos
se convierten en los actores
de las películas; esta opción
y la filmación in situ
subordinan la escenografía de
la película a los intereses de
la narrativa cinematográfica.
La estética de su producción
favorece las imágenes de
depravación y escasez en
lugar de un maquillaje
romántico de la realidad de
los sectores marginales. Pero
en cualquiera de las dos
películas, los efectos del
consumismo son reificados y atañen directamente al
individuo que se hace mercancía y se rotula con el
término “desechable”.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
26
(grupo de amigos). La narrativa cinematográfica
aparece enmarcada por la artificialidad de las luces
navideñas, los rascacielos como telón de fondo y el
moderno metro de Medellín.
interlocutor en la película así como el espectador
quedan marginados y se les imposibilita ver la que
debió ser la ciudad y pueblos aledaños que Fernando
describe.
Según Alonso Salazar, los jóvenes punkeros
terminaron, como muchas otras formas de expresión
juvenil, eliminados o incorporados a las estructuras
militares del narcotráfico; se convirtieron en
agrupaciones estructuradas alrededor del ejercicio de
la violencia, con afianzadas jerarquías y defensa militar
de sus territorios; o por lo menos asimilados a su
órbita cultural. Ellos han replicado las creencias de los
grandes capos de la droga, su lenguaje e iconografía.
Aunque sus procedimientos son ilegales, son
conservadores de las instituciones culturales que
marcan la sociedad colombiana: la madre, la familia, la
religiosidad fetichista (en particular el culto mariano) y
la venganza (121).1 Los personajes de La vendedora,
pertenecientes a ese grupo poblacional denominado
como «desechable», como los sicarios han sido
víctimas de campañas de limpieza social que
pretenden hacerlos desaparecer. Gaviria se opone
radicalmente a que se designe con este adjetivo a
dichos ciudadanos pues vendiendo droga o rosas, ellos
intentan autoabastecerse y no mendigan nada de la
gente rica de la ciudad. La inversión de Gaviria apunta
a la representación de una ciudad sombría, a inscribir
un espacio que se opone al espacio dominante para
instaurar la visibilidad de individuos que han sido
condenados a la desaparición, al desecho por la
asombrosa arrogancia del violento y absurdo esquema
social de exclusión.
Aunque la cámara de Schroeder también visita las
comunas y muchas de las calles peligrosas de
Medellín que han sido retratadas por Gaviria, hay un
mayor detenimiento en registrar el ritmo diario de
Medellín tal como se siente al recorrerla en taxis, en
el metro y en caminatas. La cámara ahora se instala
con detenimiento en esas mismas construcciones que
representan el impacto del neoliberalismo en las
ciudades latinoamericanas. La almagama que se crea
entre el protagonista como flanêur y la cámara es
sólo una excusa para que éste critique abiertamente
las enfermedades viscerales de la ciudad. Por
ejemplo, el Seminario Mayor, convertido ahora en
centro comercial, le habla de un progreso que
atropella tesoros arquitectónicos; el referente
religioso del lugar no le compete al protagonista
puesto que una constante en sus parlamentos son las
arengas contra Dios y el estamento católico.
En La virgen de los sicarios se
asoma desde el título el culto
mariano y el culto a la madre
profesados en Rodrigo D y en La
vendedora. La virgen no se
emparenta con la forma de las
películas de Gaviria no sólo por
el mayor presupuesto económico
y diferencia de estilo fílmico sino
porque la mirada que ofrece de
la marginalidad no proviene de
adentro de la misma sino que se
origina en la posición de outsider
del director. La presencia de los
pistolocos crea una inmediata
cercanía con la producción de
Gaviria . La versión fílmica es
bastante fiel a la novela original
homónima de Fernando Vallejo:
en un tono autobiográfico, el
escritor regresa a Medellín
después de treinta años de
ausencia a enfrentar la ciudad de
sus fantasmas. Lo que encuentra es una ciudad en la
que difícilmente caben sus recuerdos pues aunque
quedan los vestigios de su lugar de antaño, la
violencia, la pobreza y la injusticia han tomado el lugar
paradisíaco que alimentara los recuerdos de su niñez.
La nostalgia será, entonces, el hilo conductor del relato
que elabora para sus dos amantes sicarios pero sin
apelar a flashbacks o procedimientos similares. Al
tener que confiar en el relato del protagonista, tanto el
Fernando, el personaje de La virgen goza de una
capacidad de recordar el Medellín de antaño que le es
negada a los jóvenes de sectores marginales de
Medellín. Por ende, establece un tránsito de la
nostalgia entre “el antes” y “el después”. Al recorrer
las calles incesantemente, Fernando reconstruye para
sus amantes sicarios (y para el espectador) una
ciudad que no queda inscrita nada más que en la
memoria. Los pequeños pueblos
que rodean a la ciudad y que hoy
se han incorporado como
municipios de la ciudad gozan de
particular afecto. Sin embargo,
esos espacios heterotópicos que el
narrador intenta describir se
problematizan siempre en el
momento en que se sitúan en
ellos a los personajes. El espacio
de la ciudad y sus alrededores se
hacen una excusa para demostrar
que la nación colombiana adolece
de un proyecto de modernidad no
resuelto. Tanto el Fernando de la
novela como el de la narrativa
cinematográfica reparan
constantemente en los estragos
del periodo conocido La violencia y
las formas de violencia que el país
experimenta actualmente. Al
recordar los años 50, Fernando
señala que nada ha cambiado
“antes nos matábamos con
machetes, ahora con metralletas”.
En estas producciones, además, el manejo del
lenguaje se constituye como una práctica espacial.
Pero en La virgen ratifica el carácter de outsider de
Fernando quien conoce la nueva Medellín en parte
gracias al habla característico de las comunas y de los
sectores marginales de Medellín. Como se declara de
profesión gramático, enfrenta no sólo el desgaste del
espacio metropolitano y sus transformaciones, sino
El carácter deleble e inasible de los sicarios se
equipara por su correlación con la motocicleta que
aparece como una extensión de sus cuerpos. A pesar
de las precarias condiciones de vida de estos jóvenes,
hay una hibridez entre el sujeto (ahora descentrado) y
la máquina. Como versiones primitivas de películas de
ciencia-ficción, estos individuos están programados
para asesinar; en lugar de tecnología de laboratorio o
de espacio virtuales, la extensión de sus cuerpo es el
revólver y/o la motocicleta pues son estos
instrumentos los que validan su existencia. En La
vendedora, llama la atención la simbiosis construida en
el cuerpo de Héctor, jefe del grupo de sicarios. Con
sus pantalones de cargo, su camiseta militar y su
chaqueta con la bandera de los Estados Unidos puede
mantener el poder por ser quien administra «el fierro»
(el revólver). Su caso es una prolongación particular
pues, desprovisto de la capacidad de circulación en
motocicleta, tiene a los otros sicarios para impulsarlo
en su silla de ruedas. Su cuerpo, ahora desmembrado,
y su vestimenta contiene las secuelas del narcotráfico
así como la lucha entre el aparato legal del estado y
los sicarios y la simultánea influencia y oposición a los
Estados Unidos.
Para estos jóvenes, el asesinato como recurso para
deshacerse de los enemigos es una solución inmediata
y frecuente entre los sicarios. No hay respeto por la
vida humana y el cuerpo humano es sólo un objeto de
carácter perecedero. La muerte es un acto devaluado
y reducido al espectáculo. Aunque de tendencias
diferentes, estas tres producciones señalan como la
cultura dominante produce cierta estetización de la
violencia que juega un papel importante en la
criminalización de la juventud latinoamericana en el
margen, en este caso la de Medellín. El doble juego
surge cuando esa misma cultura dominante se
apresura a señalar como causante de males como el
terrorismo y la narcodependencia a aquellos países
que ha hecho dependientes de sus propios iconos de
poder, autosuficiencia y acceso al consumo.
_______________
October 2002
La supremacía que estas películas invitan a imitar
debe valerse de un lenguaje donde la agresión y la
desvalorización del otro estén en un lugar de
preeminencia. Por eso los términos del parlache no
son gratuitos sino que enfatizan la existencia temporal y ese proceso de desintegración del individuo. La
producción de Gaviria, por ejemplo, no calca el habla
de los sicarios y de los habitantes de las comunas,
sino que lo registra. No hay cambios, mediaciones, ni
concesiones para el espectador; incluso aquel cuya
primera lengua es el español debe descifrar y traducir
las expresiones más comúnmente utilizadas por los
personajes. En las tres producciones, una serie de
términos cobra especial importancia por la manera
cómo articulan una dialéctica de visibilidad/
27
Este lenguaje también está mediatizado por
personajes de las películas de acción de Hollywood y
sus iconos de guerra a los que los sicarios y pistolocos
admiraban. El lenguaje de sicarios y pistolocos refleja
la lógica audiovisual que domina sus identidades,
permeada por el videoclip, las tiras cómicas, las
películas de acción, la música estruendosa: sus vidas
son rafagazos de imágenes. La iconografía del
exconvicto o del veterano de Vietnam, tal como es
escenificada en películas de Hollywood, ha sido una
de las influencias más grandes en América Latina en
la constitución de un imaginario de la violencia. Para
los sicarios, las películas de Chuk Norris, Cobra Negra,
Comando, Stallone son parte de su escuela de
violencia. La iconografía de estas películas trasmite
un proyecto de masculinidad, de hombre
autoconstruido que no necesita del aparato legal del
Estado para validar su existencia y, por ende, puede
hacer justicia por sí mismo. Rambo, Cobra Negra y
otros se convierten en una imagen favorita entre la
población marginal masculina porque sus cuerpos
también son cicatrizados por la violencia. Como
Rambo, lo que se busca es el control de las
situaciones sin apelar a los mecanismos de vigilancia
del Estado, creando una imagen de masculinidad a la
que se aspira: hombres blancos, poderosos,
estadounidenses que no necesitan redención.
invisibilidad mientras que reifican el cuerpo. En este
lenguaje, el mayor insulto es palabra “gonorrea”.
«Muñeco» se refiere a un cuerpo muerto; «tomar la
foto» es matar y «abrirse» o «despegarse» es
separarse de los demás. Una persona no es un
individuo sino “la pinta”, palabra que en el español
colombiano se usa para designar la ropa. “Estar
enamorado” es querer matar a alguien. La película
insiste en la naturaleza cerrada de las pandillas de
sicarios y en la inquina de los intrusos. Los sicarios se
agrupan en parches y los amigos más cercanos se
denominan parceros. Tal como pasa en la mayoría de
la organizaciones criminales, la falta más grave es ser
un sapo (un soplón o informante). «Dar la cara»,
«mostrar la cara», es decir darle evidencias a posibles
testigos de los crímenes, son otras dos acciones que
refuerzan la necesidad del carácter anónimo
obligatorio de estos jóvenes, carácter que se convierte
en una metáfora para la pérdida de identidad del
individuo y la desintegración del ser.
Bad Subjects
que descubre que el lenguaje antioqueño ha
cambiado drásticamente en los últimos años y que la
economía del narcotráfico ha aportado al español gran
cantidad de vocablos para definir los procesos
violentos. Desde su posición de gramático, el
protagonista enfrenta el lenguaje como un
instrumento para reconocer de nuevo su nación y ni
siquiera él escapa a la sentencia formulada en la
novela en la que se hace hincapié en la ignorancia del
lector y se le critica por la necesidad de llevarlo de la
mano como si fuera un turista. Sus reflexiones sobre
el parlache (lengua de las comunas) le sirven para
corroborar que tanto el narcotráfico como la violencia
juvenil tienen sus raíces en los protagonistas de la
violencia de los años cincuenta combinado ahora con
derivaciones del inglés importadas no sólo por el culto
a los medios de comunicación sino también a raíz del
creciente tránsito Medellín-Nueva York en los años 80,
especialmente para efectos del tráfico de drogas. A
diferencia de esto, en las películas de Gaviria no hay
reflexión sobre el lenguaje sino que éste es un
componente más del entorno marginal.
Juana Suárez <juasua@earthlink.net> is Assistant Professor
of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
October 2002
Bad Subjects
28
El teatro de la violencia:
El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de
América de Pedro Santaliz
Carlos Manuel Rivera
«sólo las mujeres fecundan alas en la tierra,
su vuelo, aquelarre de mágicas hazañas».
-- Carboinael Rixema
En los años ochenta, El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de
América del director y dramaturgo Pedro Santaliz
representó en Puerto Rico y en la ciudad de Nueva
York el problema de la violencia doméstica con la obra
El castillo interior de Medea Camuñas (1992). A través
de estas representaciones en las calles y en las
comunidades marginadas de Puerto Rico y Nueva York,
El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América de Pedro Santaliz se
dio a la tarea de articular una crítica radical sobre la
continua violencia social, principalmente en lo que
respecta a la condición de la mujer. La parodia hacia
una estética de la violencia, que presenta este grupo
de teatro popular, subvierte la ideología dominante del
discurso logocéntrico y
patriarcal del teatro
puertorriqueño. Mediante
cierta renovación dirigida a
sectores marginales en
Puerto Rico, el dramaturgo
se enfoca en acentuar lo que
ha invisibilizado y ha
excluido el discurso crítico
hegemónico del teatro
puertorriqueño en la Isla y
en Nueva York. La mujer
siempre ha sido vista en
estos discursos como
víctima de un sistema que
da supremacía al hombre.
Por esto, El Nuevo Teatro
Pobre de América como
grupo de teatro popular ha representado el problema
de la violencia en la mujer para lograr su
mejoramiento dentro de las condiciones sociales con
quienes habita. La violencia contra las mujeres
comienza por el mismo discurso hegemónico
patriarcal, al este discurso excluir violentamente las
voces y los espacios femeninos dentro de la sociedad,
para así evitar la desintegración de unas ideologías
formadas en la construcción de identidad nacional que
puede ser dirigida hacia la asimilación, la anexión o
hacia la separación del discurso central de la
Federación Norteamericana. El castillo interior de
Medea Camuñas es una obra que subvierte el papel de
las mujeres dentro de esta sociedad monolítica, pues
sus acciones son vistas como una amenaza al poder
central que ha constituido la idiosincrasia del
patriarcado, independientemente de los diferentes
acercamientos ideológicos que utiliza para lograrlo.
René Marqués (1972), uno de los más importantes
dramaturgos, escribió en su ensayo «El
puertorriqueño dócil» como la mujer ha irrumpido
violentamente en los espacios literarios y teatrales
que son exclusivos de los hombres. De ahí que El
Nuevo Pobre de América de Pedro Santaliz programe
con su trabajo una transgresión hacia esos discursos
que se dan en el teatro puertorriqueño como
paradigmas absolutos, cuando la problemática de
discrimen de géneros y como consecuencia la
violencia doméstica es una disyuntiva en las clases
menos privilegiadas, al ser seguida por la ignorancia e
inconsciencia de un pueblo que obedece como
corderito a un sistema impuesto por el patriarcado, en
la que el hombre es el privilegiado, el ideólogo, el
proveedor y la mujer la sumisa, la ama de casa,
madre y criadora de hijos, sin ninguna posición
principal para tomar
decisiones en la
sociedad.
Para teatralizar esta
problemática, el
dramaturgo/ director se
vale del mito clásico de
Medea. Sin embargo,
en esta obra éste es
trocado y desmitificado
para exaltar no la
Medea que por sus
acciones disidentes y
criminales es castigada
y destruida por la
sociedad; sino para
indagar cómo el
discurso patriarcal
vigila y castiga, pero no toma en cuenta qué fue lo
que llevó a esta mujer a cometer un crimen contra
sus propios hijos, y cómo esto surgió como
consecuencia del abuso y la injusticia que los
hombres cometen contra ella y que la sociedad acepta
sin cuestionarlos.
El castillo interior de Medea Camuñas gira alrededor
de una mujer peluquera, casada con un conductor de
autobuses de San Juan, Puerto Rico, Jacho y con tres
hijos de un matrimonio anterior. Esta familia
disfuncional de delincuentes—traficantes de drogas,
esposo adultero, quien esconde sus actos en la
religión protestante mata a Medea Camuñas, al
escaparse un disparo de uno de los mafiosos que
persigue al esposo y a sus hijos. Por esta razón, esta
obra representa un imaginario simbólico contra la
subalternidad histórica de la mujer a partir de la obra
de Pedreira, Insularismo. El uso de este personaje
clásico alude a la defensa de la voz y la justicia de la
mujer en frente del mundo y de la sociedad.
Carlos Rivera teaches Latin American Drama at Davidison
College
En fin y para concluir, el teatro de la violencia
representado por El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América de
Pedro Santaliz en la obra El castillo interior de Medea
Camuñas (1992) creó una ruptura con el significado
homogéneo de la política de control del discurso
patriarcal. La hegemonía de este discurso ha
establecido que el discurso femenino debe estar
afiliado a las acciones básicas de la casa y de la
maternidad en la sociedad puertorriqueña. Aquí, la
pieza desmitifica la figura clásica de Medea para
subvertir la soberanía del patriarcado que demuestra la
representación de las voces excluidas y marginadas
por sus acciones impermisibles dentro de la sociedad.
De esta manera, se refleja como la combinación
heterogénea de géneros en Puerto Rico ha cambiado la
razón unidimensional hacia la representación de la
mujer. Ahora ellas y ellos celebran su aquelarre que
desconstruye la violencia creada por el orden
patriarcal.
_______________
29
Bad Subjects
Esta pieza se escenifica con una estética paródica
que utiliza el discurso de los marginados y el lenguaje
coloquial y de jerga de estos individuos de clases
sociales menos privilegiadas, para desconstruir la
hegemonía y para representar la violencia en la
escena. De ahí que Santaliz recurra a la técnica del
metateatro, utilizando a un narrador que separa el
recuento de la historia y su representación como en el
teatro griego y en el teatro épico brechtiano. Sin
embargo, esta metateatralidad es simultánea; es una
intertextualidad donde un narrador organiza y
comenta la historia, ya que trabaja como un coro
griego que crea un distanciamiento como Brecht, para
que el espectador analice y se motive a cambiar la
abyección representada. Este recurso deviene como
una parodia o como un juego teatral, llevando a la
audiencia a ver la pieza como una parodia narrativa
en la que estás en dos representaciones a la vez: la
clásica Medea de Eurípides y Medea Camuñas. Otro
recurso es la incorporación de un ritual caribeño
esotérico—espiritismo y santería. En este ritual,
visualizamos una parodia grotesca de la catarsis
aristotélica del teatro griego, para que el espectador
mediante este choque contradictorio de trance
espiritista y santero, cree un distanciamiento de lo
presentado y no se envuelva en sensiblerías externas
que no logran el cambio, el análisis, el mejoramiento
o la revolución individual, social y colectiva, como la
proponían Artaud, Valle Inclán y más tarde Bertold
Brecht con un teatro de distanciamiento entre lo que
sucede en la escena y el espectador. De la misma
forma, con este recurso el dramaturgo participa en la
obra como personaje, ya que como narrador es uno
de ellos, pero también es el escritor creador quien da
vida a los personajes y a los mismos personajes que
él se desdobla frente al público. En este sentido, la
obra es desarrollada por el pastiche que imita e
incorpora otros estilos de la copia original a la nueva
pieza.
De esta manera, a través de la obra visualizamos a
El Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América como un grupo de
resistencia que representa a través de la parodia la
problemática social y sus relaciones simbólicas, en la
cual la violencia y la crisis social llevan a destruir la
lucha inalcanzable del sujeto femenino por mantener
una posición inquebrantable dentro de la sociedad
puertorriqueña. Por esto, en la obra observamos como
espectadores un distanciamiento de la original, ya que
no es una imitación de ella, sino además de que se
incorporan parlamentos de Eurípides, lo más
importante está en la transmisión de un mensaje de
conciencia social sobre la problemática de violencia
doméstica, opresión y marginación de la voz y el
espacio femenino en la sociedad puertorriqueña.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
30
Meditations on Brutality and
Digital Imagery
Cheryl Greene and Zachary Waggoner
Technology
the machine
the computerized wet dream
soaking, sucking
our creativity, our sensitivity
our capability to grasp the concept of humanity
So I have one question
Are we gonna utilize it or become it
October 2002
—Ursula Rucker “Digichant”
In a year of record profits, outselling even the film
industry, the video game industry has created some of
the most violent games ever. In Sony’s Grand Theft
Auto III the gamer, playing as an escaped con who
specializes in car-jacking, drives around a fictional
metropolis. In order to survive in the city, the carjacker needs to find work —the mission to “earn”
money. The exciting part of this game environment is
that drivers and pedestrians move about freely; it’s a
living world. As the avatar drives around they can
participate in gratuitous and senseless violence because it is a way to “earn” more money. They mug and
murder citizens by driving over them in their car, then
go back and take whatever cash they can off the
bodies. Another option is to go find a prostitute, who
will get in the car when it stops. When she leaves, the
avatar is down some cash, but they can always go
back and steal it back by running her over like the
other citizens.
The increased popularity of ever-more violent or
mature games is a disturbing trend. Set in “smart
environments” designed to give the gamer “genuine
social interaction,” these games are beginning to move
beyond merely shooting someone, by providing a
scenario where a gamer must figure out how to get a
character to work with them. However, many of the
social interactions depend on a violent construct. Not
surprisingly, three of the best selling games of 2001
for Nintendo, whose empire was founded on E (everybody)-rated games, were M(mature)-rated. Half of the
industry’s 2001 retail profits came from Sony’s
Playstation2 which features the best-selling and highly
controversial Grand Theft Auto III. Not wanting to miss
out on the profits, Microsoft finally entered the console
gaming market in December 2001 with its new system
Xbox.
The questions and controversies surrounding violent
M-rated video games have grown over the last 25
years as digital technology has allowed companies like
Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft to depict ever more
realistic violence that promises to immerse the gamer
psychologically as well as viscerally. What forms do
these games take to create a “smart environment” to
arouse and satisfy gamers’ desires? Where does
digital entertainment enter the realm of human
needs, and how do these video-worlds mimic reality?
Killer Self-Esteem
Imagistic violence, such as figuring out how to
shoot someone, has been the norm where gamers
explore an architectural environment. First-person
shooter games like House of the Dead II, Duke
Nukem 3D, and Doom ask gamers to become the
main character. You look through their eyes and
control their actions – that main avatar is you. These
games have mostly linear plot lines, where a gamer’s
interaction with their world is limited. Generally, the
avatar begins by following a preset path, killing the
bad guys in front of them, finding keys to open the
locked passage ways, and gathering weapons and
healthpacks. This pattern is repeated ad nauseum
throughout various levels of a game.
In a Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke notes how
watching realistic violent imagery in films can begin to
define aspects of identity. “[Their] awareness of
[themselves] as a developing person requires a
vocabulary – and the images of brutality and violence
provide such a vocabulary, empowering the self by
the punishing or slaying of troublesome motives as
though they were wholly external.” Understood this
way, gamers build confidence and self-esteem
through killing when they complete the game objectives. Visual excitement comes from maneuvering
through a changing architectural scene, as well as
solving the problem of how to kill the unique bad-guy
character types that an avatar encounters on a quest
for survival.
House of the Dead II, one of the most popular
arcade games, is an example of one of these firstperson shooter games, where the gamer must choose
between killing zombies and victim citizens. Saving
citizens from the zombies gains the avatar points.
Although they lose points when they kill victim
citizens, it doesn’t prevent them from successfully
completing the game’s objectives. There is a doubleness in such violence, one that nominally penalizes
but simultaneously permits ultimate reward for such
killings. An ambiguous vocabulary of violence informs
the game, one where success proves more important
than representations of life.
Video games satisfy human curiosities, desires, and
fears. They are constructed on models that combine
consumer psychology, evolutionary theory and
software. When we enter these visual realms we find
the denizens of the underworld. Aliens, terrorists,
monsters, zombies, and femme fatales challenge our
fears and desires. M-rated games use interactive
The newest games, like Medal of Honor Frontline and
Command and Conquer Renegade, immerse gamers in
interactive battlegrounds. In Renegade the avatar
Gender, Race and Nationalism
Such notions play into the popular American belief
in individualism, making the game an ideological
training ground for proving an ability to climb violently to the top. The noble quest is a justification for
preserving dominant cultural beliefs and values, and
the visual rhetoric heroicizes the image of the individual as a killing machine – a stoic individual with a
“natural” predatory instinct.
begins, in the words of a Wired article, “with nothing
more than a pistol and an attitude,” yet acquires heavy
assault guns, C4 explosives and sniper rifles. In these
popular real-time war battles emotions of patriotism
pander to an American desire for clear-cut nationalistic
triumphs in a new age of terror. More games are
being created to appeal to American desires for a
digital world that mimics real-life and real-time situations in the way films allow us to escape when we
visually enter a film’s narrative space.
October 2002
But are these avatars maneuvering through a
suburban scene from American Beauty? In Medal of
Honor Frontline your character can track down Germans in a deserted
French town right
out of Spielberg’s
Saving Private Ryan.
Characters prowl
through liminal
spaces where
violence appears to
erupt “naturally.”
They hunt for
enemies in shady
streets and alleyways, explore
abandoned warehouses for zombies,
and drive through
the dangerous zones
of cities that we
recognize as the
spaces where
prostitutes, gangs
and drug dealers
thrive. It is here, in
the seedier sites of
our national psyche,
where avatars pile
Myths of gender, race, and money permeate these
video realms. In Fallout 2, set in the wastes of a
post-apocalyptic world, the Chosen One embarks on
an epic journey to uncover the secrets that will
preserve their people’s way of life. Fallout 2 can be
played as a grave robber, a baby killer and a porn
star (all are “attributes” that the Chosen One can
attain). Although this game of survival is steeped in a
narrative of noble quest, the Chosen One still must
kill and loot bodies in order to achieve the game’s
objective. Because provisions are scarce in this postapocalyptic world, extra supplies are important for
bartering. Even though there are many female
opponents, heroism remains carefully couched in
hyper-masculinism where the only rewards are for
violent behavior. Thus, Fallout 2 follows a model of
evolutionary theory where the fittest survive.
31
Bad Subjects
environments that present a scenario that requires
the avatar to perform violent acts in order to fulfill the
game’s objectives. Shooting, maiming, exploding,
pillaging, rioting, looting, and fornicating are norms
in these worlds of total immersion, where bulletinduced carnage is often made to seem virtuous.
Violent crime pays as you navigate built-in escape
routes in Grand Theft Auto III .
October 2002
Bad Subjects
32
up carnage, bodies are hacked to pieces, and blood
endlessly spurts — all in the name of the pursuit of
individual “happiness.”
Today’s games play into our never-ending desire to
buy our way to” happiness.” For it’s the ideology of
consumerism that allows individuals to pursue their
every pleasure no matter what the actual cost. In a
consumer economy where money gives us the power
to achieve anything and everything we desire, these
digital realms fulfill the gamer by allowing them to
pursue their killing desires. Killing is equated with
“happiness” as the need to consume is transferred into
a need to win by shooting and hunting down enemies.
In the world of games the more challenging the game
the more fulfilling a victory becomes. Furthermore,
the power we achieve through controlling others in the
game allows us to renew our dwindling sense of
freedom in a world where we feel constantly surveyed
by our own technological underpinnings.
In this way, the games’ visual aesthetics reinforce
images of “normalized” violence we see everyday on
the evening news. Thus, games don’t provide an
alternative digital world where
everyone is “free.” Instead, the
never-ending rhetoric of
violence re-inscribes the same
dominant stereotypes where
women and minorities are
delegated to the position of
Other. Most of the heroes are
white men, and when they
appear, women have anatomically impossible bodies.
History and consciousness
become sites of aesthetic
production for contemporary
ideologies and trauma. As
games provide more artful
versions of reality, the PC
games and console games like
Nintendo, Playstation 2 and
Xbox allow players to star in
their own version of World War
II as in Medal of Honor. Better
yet, it’s possible to navigate
three epochs of violence –
classical Roman, medieval and
modern-day – as a tortured
soul who confronts natural, psychological and supernatural forces in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
A character’s sanity changes as they maneuver
through the unique violence of each historical period,
of course armed with period-appropriate weaponry.
The actual game environment and interface turns
hostile as a player’s sanity drops. Violent hallucinations
occur, and as a player struggles to retain a “sense of
reality” during play, the avatar’s arms and head fall
off.
Such untrustworthy images force a player to continually face this myopic world of visual and psychological
violence. Violence takes on a new edge when a gamer
struggles to distinguish psychological trauma from
“real-game” trauma. But is there a difference? And
how do we process the difference between imagistic
violence and psychological events when it is all happening in real-time? Psychological violence moves the
gamer beyond the aesthetics of visual scenes of heroic
bloody carnage and takes the gamer to a virtual world
that adapts in ways the gamer can’t always anticipate.
The game becomes an unforseen psychological landscape where violence can unfold in ways that even the
designerse did not deliberately plan.
Virtual Nightmares
In the quest for perfect digital reproductions of
human reality – how do we read violence? Barbara
Stafford writes “Today – while a flood of electronic
spectacles purvey pleasure, often through the infliction
of pain, a rising tide of language-based criticism
threatens to destroy any awareness that there is such
a thing as a responsible image.” Should we leave it up
to the corporations making billion-dollar profits to
determine what artful constructs will shape how we
“see?” We don’t even know what divergent feelings are
aroused during immersion in a violent game.
Characters in games act spontaneously, developing
new responses to situations as the game proceeds
much like the way we interact in real-life when we
make instant decisions about people and situations. In
these new complex and interactive environments the
eruption of violence occurs so unpredictably that the
gamer must react instinctively and without a moment’s
hesitation. It’s in these moments that the game ceases
to be “unreal” for there’s no time to stop and reflect
before acting – this is just a game. The virtual training
ground is too believable because the gamer is psychologically immersed in the need to fulfill their desired
goals.
“smart environments” that overload gamers with
complete immersion into a world where psychological
violence takes on the shape of our deepest fears.
How realistic do you want your virtual dreams to be?
_______________
Cheryl Greene <cmgreen@asu.edu> and Zachary Waggoner
<Zachary.Waggoner@asu.edu> are both Ph.D. students in
Rhetoric, Composition and Linguistics at Arizona State
University.
Do we want interactive digital violence to be the
aesthetic standard by which we understand and know
our world? The video game industry is building its
multi-billion dollar future by feeding our desires for
Claudia Herbst
Computer graphics imaging, CGI, originated in
World War II with radar technology. During the
1960s, supported by military funding, major
breakthroughs in CGI technology followed at facilities
such as the MIT research labs. In response to
significant military spending during the Reagan era,
CGI experienced another major boost. Since the late
‘80s CGI technology has developed into a profitable
and rapidly growing industry spanning across a wide
range of disciplines such as the entertainment
industry, the sciences, and the military. The planned
military spending proposed by the current
administration by all likelihood will cause another
surge in imaging technologies and, therefore, in
related industries and disciplines.
CGI software and operating systems offer
commands such as “Kill -take no hostages”,
“Execute”, “Terminate” and “Point and Shoot” which
are leftovers from its martial origins and a byproduct
of the military funded research of CGI technologies.
So are functions called “collision events” which allow
users to create digital explosions, sparks, and flying
debris with ease. The substructure of data, the
smallest denominator of computer imagery, is
hierarchical and similar to that of troops and ranks
within the military. It seems apt that many video
games produced with this type of technology display
the common theme of organized violence such as it
occurs during war.
The virtual Lara is not yet a woman but she is past
girlhood, old enough to exude sexuality and to display
a serious attitude. The virtual Lara Croft may very well
be the role model many teen and pre-teenage girls will
aspire to. A sense of disappointment may set in when
girls realize that their bodies will not develop into the
unlikely, computer generated forms of their computergenerated heroines. The presence and coolness of the
gun is even more troubling because in the world of
gun-laden computer games no one really dies. In the
world of CGI, violence has no lasting consequences;
with every new game, and without the struggle and
pains of birth, characters are reborn.
October 2002
CGI is a highly gendered technology. Its origins in
primarily male disciplines contribute to its gendering.
The cornerstones of CGI are the sciences,
mathematics, and the military, all disciplines in which
women have had little presence.
Amidst this imagery and underlying structure of
violence a new image of woman is presented, one of
sexualized aggression. For example, computer games
feature virtual heroines such as Lara Croft in the
acclaimed game Tomb Raider. Lara Croft mainly
displays two features: overt sexiness and an obvious
potential for violence. Her character seamlessly
combines two big spectacles, sex and death. Lara has
long dark hair, puffy lips, combined with a fierce look
in her eyes. She wears boots, shorts, a tight tank top
and round glasses. For a moment her appearance
alleges intellectualism, but the glasses are sunglasses,
not reading aides. Her breasts are disproportionately
large, her waist impossibly tiny. Most importantly,
though, in a garter belt like holster, Lara carries a big
gun. While originally a virtual character, Lara now
appears in the flesh on the big screen: fantasy has
become real, been made flesh! Other computer games
such as Parasite Eve and Tekken 3 depict similar, if not
identical, models of the female gender.
Extreme Sex, Death and
CGI Technology
33
Bad Subjects
The hyper-real aesthetics of violence, in which we
are invited to “star” in our own private versions of
urban wars and crime sprees, does not bring us closer
to a humane understanding of ourselves but rather
farther from it. As Ursula Rucker sings in Digichant
“Computer games improve hand-eye coordination/
Well/ more than a nation of our children have become
violent/ start buckwildin’ in quiet town schools/ fool
parents and neighbors with that nice kid bit/ learned
to hate on the Aryan website.” Virtual violence bleeds
into our world blurring the lines between fantasy and
reality.
Like computer games, CGI-enhanced movies provide
a new image of women. Movies like the Alien sequels,
Terminator I & II, Hardware, GI Jane, The Fifth
Element, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, et al, present
images delineating sexualized aggression. In these
movies it is through aggression and the expression of
violence that women gain respect from their peers.
The movie Terminator II presented a female character
that is all muscle and impressively gun savvy. Ripley,
the main female character in Alien III, is tougher than
the male inmates she encounters in a postmodern
prison-monastery in outer space. She barely escapes a
rape situation and in the end sacrifices her life. In Alien
IV her now cloned character reappears. Her cloned
version is devoid of emotions, unable to experience
pain or fear.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
34
The lead character in GI Jane also nearly gets raped
and she is beaten so severely she spits blood. Not until
she delivers an equal or even greater amount of blows,
violence and pain against her aggressor do male
soldiers respect her. Women, according to the new
image, not only dish it out like men, women get
beaten like men. GI Jane also pleads for her right to
“come home in a body bag”. The issue of equality,
generally the argument when it comes to women and
organized violence, rings hollow for the following
reason.
Equality, in order to persist and flourish, requires
and is dependent on a governmental system or
structure such as democracy. Democracy is based on
the rule of majority and is a system in which the
supreme power is vested in the people and exercised
by them directly. Events such as war, a state of
hostility, conflict, or antagonism, by definition
undermine democracy. Participation in events such as
war which is an event poisoning the soil necessary for
democracy to flourish, by definition should and can
not be defined as equality.
Some have praised the new powerful images of
women. Admittedly, the women in the examples
mentioned represent strong, self-reliant, fearless and
confident individuals: a refreshing sight on any
screen, big or small. However, history teaches us that
increased levels of violence rarely gains anything.
News reports abound with stories of escalating girlgang violence and higher numbers of female prison
inmates. Images of sexy violence are no more
desirable than the previously common images of sexy
incompetence. More importantly, the new image of
women is not a product of women’s vision of
themselves but of the
male-dominated CGI
and film industries.
Lastly, women in these
images have merely
taken on the roles of
the aggressor, a role for
which they have
criticized men in the
past. Violence and
empowerment are not
synonymous. And while
games and movies may
be fictional, they imitate
life.
CGI technologies play
another key role in life
and death situations
and thus further shape
the meaning of gender.
Computer technology is
applied in disciplines
such as Bioinformatics
because knowledge in
biology has exploded in
such a way that
powerful tools are
required for the
organization and interpretation of complex data. CGI
often is applied because complex sets of data are
better analyzed and understood when visualized.
One can get a sense of the presence and
importance of CGI in Bioinformatics when hearing
such terms as BioMedical Graphics, Molecular
Graphics, and 3D Microscopy. In particular, the
importance of CGI in reproductive technologies
becomes clearer when seeing graphical user
interfaces used for genome map assembly, or when
coming across computer-generated, 3D
representations of DNA (the double helix).
Sonograms are a further, albeit technically less
advanced, example of the application of visualization
technologies in reproductive processes.
Of importance is the fact that reproductive
processes thus far, throughout world history and
across cultures, have been women’s domain. It is
women who carry a child to term and give birth. Now
CGI, by its origin and application, is utilized at the
interface of destruction and creation at once. CGI
technologies at once occupy the line separating life
from death by virtue of its origin and wide application
in the military, on the one hand, and reproductive
technologies on the other. It is the combination of the
closeness of life and death in CGI, paired with the
absence of women, that is troubling.
A critical aspect in the
genderedness of CGI
technology is the nature of
the language that opaquely
shapes technology:
programming languages.
Programming languages,
code, represent not only a
form of language but, more
importantly, a new form of
text.
In its exclusiveness and in its cultural significance
there is only one form of text comparable to code:
religious text.
Religious text and code share a variety of
characteristics, hinting at the similarities in the scope
of power exercised through them. Religious text and
code, both lie outside the realm of the fiction/nonfiction category. Both are generated by an educated,
elite group of men. Like religious texts, code sets
rules, it commands. Like religious text code is linear,
hierarchical and, mirroring patriarchy, it is male.
Code can be defined as an agent operating in the
distribution of power. Its significance in this role can
hardly be overestimated. Code plays a key role in the
virtual and real continuation of violence as well as in
accessing the powers of reproduction. The text
upholding the technology separating life from death
becomes all the
more powerful for
its opaque nature.
While
Wittgenstein, for
example, spoke of
language as a
public
phenomenon, code
has a stealthy
quality as it is
largely invisible. It
lies and operates
beneath the
surface, hidden to
the user in the
depths of the
interface. It is a
text accessible
only to
technological initiates, a text reserved for those
educated in inventing and sustaining technology.
Traditionally women have been excluded from this
group.
While men write code, women primarily remain
illiterate when it comes to the production of this
powerful and influential new text. The consequences of
illiteracy are far reaching. To write code means to have
power, or rather, code is power.
_______________
Claudia Herbst <http://claudiaherbst.org> is assistant
professor of computer graphics and interactive media at Pratt
Institute. She can be reached at <cherbst@pratt.edu>.
October 2002
Code literally makes
technology work. It holds the
capacity to characterize
software and interface. Code
upholds technology, technology in turn informs
culture. As a form of text, code has no poetic
qualities. Code is the categorical rationalization of
language, no longer an instrument for lyricism but the
tool to command technology.
Code contains no narrative, has no narrator and no
narrative subject. There is no other text that is
culturally as relevant while simultaneously entirely void
of narrative. All culturally influential texts, that is, texts
reaching the masses concurrently and consistently,
historically have been based on narrative in some
form. Prior to code, texts defining power roles
exercised power by means of narrative; religious texts
offer one example, history as a text offers another. A
radical break with this tradition of the narrative/power
correlation such as code introduces variation in the
definition and exercise of power.
35
Women’s identity, which partially is defined through
women’s reproductive potential- whether that
potential is actually fulfilled or not- is taking on a
different meaning, arguably one less powerful.
Despite the capacity for major medical breakthroughs
due to CGI and other computer technology in
Bioinformatics and related fields, the absence of
women’s voices in fields this
powerful is nothing less than
tragic.
Access to the production of language has been linked
to the powers of reproduction in the past: for example,
religious texts have historically forbidden birth control.
Literacy, however, has been identified as the best
method of birth control in Third World countries. Code
sets a further example in that code upholds the
technology with which we tap into not only
reproduction, but evolution itself.
Bad Subjects
the face and meaning of this monopoly, hence source
of power and identity, for better or for worse, is
changing. War in the past has been a male domain. It
is no coincidence that CGI-heavy visuals are
promoting images of women in aggressive, fighter
roles such as typically identified with soldiers, while
men, aided by the same technology, increasingly tap
into the powers of reproduction. As men take on the
powers of reproduction, women are invited to the
front lines. This marks a clear shift in the meaning of
gender.
Bad Subjects
36
[Sadistic] California
Dreaming: Pleasure in the
Breaking of Mexican Bodies
William Anthony Nericcio
No kind of sensation is keener and more active than
that of pain; its impressions are unmistakable.
One must do violence to the object of one’s desire;
when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
-- The 120 Days of
October 2002
Sodom, Marquis de Sade
Hit me, hit me.
Strike me, strike me.
Love me, love me.
The peculiar and particular attention paid Mexican
bodies by a predominantly Anglo Californian Law
Enforcement community reaches heights that we must
think past the easy solution of racism to answer.
Following my late-lamented theoretical informant,
Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, who knew so
much that he missed the ambulance with his name
written on it, I think it’s important, if disturbing, to
think about the pleasure that comes from such acts as
walloping undocumented immigrants on the head and
body, pinioning their arms behind their backs as they
scream in an incomprehensible tongue.
Pleasure? Yes, pleasure. Sexual pleasure of a decidedly Sadistic twist. The exotic we know is erotic, and I
am beginning to think that the recent history of our
Southern Californian cultural space, Rodney King, the
Rebellion in LA, the beatings of various Mexicans, has
more to do with de Sade than it does with Hitler or
Mengele or whatever. That is, that at root, there is an
erotic dimension to these beatings.
We might advocate some test beating of a mojado,
as we lovingly call them in Laredo, and test my
theory, but my inculcated viva la raza politicization
saves me this ugly task. Let’s look at a couple of
recent incidents to test this eros of violence theory:
As the police baton rises and falls on the body of
Ms. Alicia Sotero Vasquez something must be going
through her head, something to explain the sensation,
the pain, the fear—all in the midst of sounds that
mean nothing. Two Riverside Sheriffs are shouting at
her and her accomplice, the driver of the truck above,
shouting in English. Later, in the hospital, all she can
say is: “They beat me worse than an animal. I didn’t
run, nothing. They took me by the hair. I didn’t insult
them. I didn’t say anything to them.” They wouldn’t
have understood if she had.
As the police baton rises and falls on the body of
Ms. Sotero something must be going through the
head of Riverside Sheriffs Department officer Tracy
Watson, something to explain the rage and the glee,
the pleasure really, that he takes as he goes about his
job.
In the middle of all this hovering above the scene
like a nightingale, like an angel, like a perverted
voyeur, the skycam channel 9 helicopter, our eye in
the sky records all that falls within its lens, all that
needs to be seen again and again and again...
<http://www.cnn.com/US/9604/02/
immigrant.beating/index2.html>
_______________
William Nerricio is Professor of Film and Literature at San
Aaron Scott
Golub began
making figurative
paintings in the early
1950s after graduating from Chicago’s
Interrogation
Art Institute; his
early influences for series like Priests, Burnt Man and
Sphinx were classical and mythological sources.
These often singular, archetypal figures were executed on unstretched canvas in a raw, expressionistic style likened to Dubuffet and Giacometti. In
paintings like Hamlet, The Skin (Crawling Man I), and
the Philosopher series, the themes were decidedly
existential. In 1959 Golub and his wife, artist Nancy
Spero, moved to Paris where they rented a large
Among the strongest of these were the Combat and
Gigantomachy series, tumultuous compositions of
fighting bodies stuck in an arrested state of decomposition. These paintings function, formally and conceptually, as a ground-zero for Golub’s subsequent work.
During this time his painting style became even more
stripped-down: he ground paint directly on the canvas,
and developed a method of scraping away layers of
paint using knives and rubbing alcohol to reveal
chunks of raw canvas underneath (a technique that he
has used to the present). The paintings began to take
on more of the qualities of sculptures, featuring “the
removal and chipping away or carving out of surfaces,”
remnants of subtractive gestures and large tracts of
unfinished canvas. What remained was “…a ‘sculptural’ image of man, ravaged and eroded but still its
essential existential structure.”
Vietnam and Latin America
When he returned to the U.S. in the late 1960s, the
Vietnam War was in full swing, and Golub began
searching for a more direct means of relating his
paintings to the burgeoning antiwar
movement. His exposure to the
Algerian War during his stay in Paris
had solidified his commitment to
political engagement, and at that
time in New York a group called
Artists and Writers Protest was
meeting regularly to discuss ways to
pressure cultural institutions to take
a stand against the Vietnam conflict.
He participated in Angry Arts Week,
actions of the Art Workers Coalition,
and various other protests that met
with mixed results.
The imprint of these activities on
Golub’s figurative paintings was
unmistakable: his figures began to
gravitate towards specific contexts, gaining clothing
and more fleshed-out backgrounds. The ensuing
series of paintings, Napalm and Vietnam, were colossal, brutal and didactic. Golub describes them as his
“most austere, irredeemable, and existentially fatalistic
works”. Still set within a generalized mode of representation, the paintings marked a bridge between his
classically-oriented, expressionist paintings and the
“immediate, objective, factual designations” which
October 2002
Drawing from a vast repository of images –
magazine clippings, hardcore pornography,
newspaper photos – Golub uses a cut-and-paste
pastiche to compose figurative tableaus that blatantly
flout aesthetic conventions while confronting the
spectator with a bleak and uncompromising theater of
cruelty. Golub paints in order to demystify power, to
analyze the lens through which we see violence, but
at the same time to
explore our
discomfort/
fascination with its
machinations. He
draws viewers ever
further into a
charred landscape
brimming with
impotent rage and
bankrupt ideologies.
studio space and Golub was able to work on a dramatically larger scale. His subject matter expanded to
include nude figures, often engaged in a kind of
primordial combat — in his words, “conflict in an
existential mode”.
“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.” This quote from Adorno, penned in 1937,
appears in the form of a slogan emblazoned across
the bottom of one of Leon Golub’s recent paintings
entitled Bite Your Tongue. For Adorno, such “late
works” had to be both critical and utopic, capable of
combating the dehumanizing and anaesthetizing
effects of the culture industry on the one hand, while
reunifying the subject as a sensuous being on the
other. Adorno’s quote might have been taken as a
prescription for Golub’s own “late work,” which,
drawing from a rich vocabulary of symbols, emerges
as a kind of libidinal explosion. In Golub’s politicallycharged oeuvre over the last 50 years he has repeatedly and compulsively depicted the more extreme
atrocities to plague our century. While his vision falls
more in the category of the dystopic, he has struggled
to expose what is truly human in our response to
violence and suffering.
37
Bad Subjects
Beware of Dog: Trauma and
Repetition in Leon Golub’s Art
October 2002
Bad Subjects
38
would emerge in 1972 in the form of guns and uniforms (in Vietnam I). The Vietnam series established
Golub’s reputation as an activist painter.
Golub also began cutting sections of canvas
out of paintings during this time, likening the
canvas to skin, a move he deemed an “irrational” gesture (referring no doubt to both
the irrationality of the act of painting, and the
form of the violence depicted). This physical
act of mutilation, on the one hand an assault
against the convention of the rectangle, on
the other an extension of his subtractive
painting technique, also seemed to reflect a
growing
ambivalence
towards the
validity of
his painting
project. By
the mid1970s Golub had
stopped painting
altogether – destroying most of his
existing works.
This dry spell lasted
only a few years,
during which time
Golub searched for a new language that would provide
a more “concrete engagement” with the subjects of
power and domination. He chose to focus on political
leaders, which he painted from photographs at
approximately one-and-a-half time life size. By the
late 1970s he had completed over 100 such paintings
of important political leaders – Fidel Castro, Nelson
Rockefeller, Ho Chi Minh, Brezhnev, etc. Often he
painted several portraits of the same leaders – there
are at least eight portraits of Kissinger for example –
each one equally meticulous and equally opaque.
During this same period Golub painted his first
Mercenaries painting (1976), which, together with the
Interrogation series would become his best-known
body of work. These overtly political paintings, suffused with imagery from South American revolutions,
depicted “terrorists” in the most basic sense of the
term – men consumed with the jouissance of atrocity.
The involvement of the United States military and CIA
in fighting communist revolutions during the Reagan
years is a not-so-subtle subtext in these works, one of
which the viewer cannot help but be aware. Like the
political portraits, Mercenaries unleashed ruthless
machismo and extreme scenarios of domination, and
by choice of subject, drew an explicit correlation
between money, power and war. Soldiers-for-hire are
often shown casually joking around, as if on break
from a torture or execution; in many paintings they
stare directly out at the viewer, unashamed and
unselfconscious. The Interrogations paintings featured
scenes of torture and abuse with a similar blend of
casualness and savagery, the figures frozen in abrupt,
offhanded gestures. In the early 1980’s, the Horsing
Around paintings used the hot-button issues of race
and sex to describe similarly awkward displays of
boorish power-play. The White Squad and Riot
paintings from the same period extended the Mercenaries themes of unadulterated
bloodlust/sadism.
In the 1980s Golub returned
to some of the classical themes
that formed the bedrock his
early work – columns and
sphinxes; these paintings were
formally more dense, emphasizing the surface qualities of the
painting, as well as brushstroke
and color. Simultaneously he
continued to work with scenes
of aggression with Street
Scenes and Night Scenes.
Golub’s work since the late
‘80’s has shifted to include more
of a mixture of pop culture elements, mythological
and biblical references, and graffiti slogans. In short,
the subject matter of the earlier paintings is radically
dissimulated, and the previous staged acts of terror
are stripped down into their ideological roots, scattered and reassembled. Where the Mercenaries
series presented straightforward studies of brutality,
these paintings are dissonant collages of jingoistic
cliches and symbols culled from war, mythology, Tshirt slogans, biker magazines, billboards, philosophy,
and history. The paintings are shrill and boldly
executed, making no effort to reconcile the barrage of
propagandistic icons and surreal slogans that occur in
unlikely, often contradictory combinations. Golub has
also mined his ouevre for recurring formal elements,
which are then re-appropriated and transmuted; in
his retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art two
years ago, Golub made enormous transparencies of
blown-up details from pre-existing paintings which
were then interspersed with the paintings throughout
the space, reiterrating the theme of violence as both
a lens and an irreducible surface. Crude patriotism is
a recurrent theme in the recent work, an its proponents appear to be part of the same milieu as the
death squads in Mercenaries. Death is also a pervasive presence, often seeming to function as a hallucinatory metaphor for both the death of idealism and
the pointless suffering inflicted in the name of various
idealisms.
Transcendental Grudge Matches
Golub’s use of scrapbook-media as a source for his
paintings appears to be a deliberate attempt to raise
questions about how we respond to images of violence in our increasingly image-saturated society.
Electronic media, once thought to be the vehicle
towards a better understanding and more intimate
perspective on military conflict, have disclosed themselves to be more often an instrument of State
propaganda, coercion and obfuscation. Since the
brief window of journalistic freedom witnessed during
the Vietnam War, a direct view of the obscene aspects
of armed conflict has been reduced to a trickle of
Golub’s paintings present a
number of difficulties to the
Burnt Man
typical viewer: no-holds-barred
approach to content, combined
with the confrontational graphic style, makes the
works difficult to assimilate. By repeatedly invoking
similar scenarios of cruelty in different (though
unspecified) historical contexts, he often appears to
treat both oppressors and victims as pawns in a kind
of transcendental grudge match characterized by an
“eternal use of power against powerlessness.” To
many, this makes his paintings seem detached,
insensitive, and even exploitative.
This quality stands in stark contrast to the unmitigated brutality of the acts depicted. A dynamic thus
exists in Golub’s paintings which is both arresting and
“Muteness” is a good word in reference to Golub’s
work because it conveys both a sense of the limitations
of the medium Golub struggles with, and our incapacity as spectators to adequately address his subject
matter. The paintings don’t tell us enough, and we in
turn as viewers are hampered in our response. Normal
expectations of spectatorship are short-circuited, as
the whole notion of painterly distance falls into
shambles. The paintings threaten to overwhelm the
pictorial field, but stuck in a palimpsest of fractured
surfaces, are unable to penetrate the indifference of
the canvas/screen, and must instead resign themselves to stupidly and defiantly return our gaze. As
spectators we are witnesses to extreme acts
of brutality which not only shock us in their
banality, but implicate us, draw us into the
perverse spectacle as witnesses and possible co-conspirators. The paintings refuse
to offer an escape from the gaze, from the
relentless scrutiny of ourselves as objects in
what Lacan calls “the field of representation.” What emerges instead in Golub’s
paintings is an unresolved conflict of distance: we lose control of our distancing
capacity, are unable to find in the paintings
a refuge from the vagaries of the world.
Our experience is a mixture of impotence
and anger that suggests both identification
with the perpetrators (we are complicit with
the crimes), and the impossibility of such
an identification ( we remain unable to
comprehend/assimilate the act). The paintings do not
make the crimes seem more plausible, only more
horrific.
This contradiction is one of voyeuristic horror/
pleasure: on the one hand his characters are shameless, and it is perhaps this lack of any display of selfconsciousness which discomforts, pushes us back. At
the same time however, we are conscious of our role
as privileged viewers, allowed and encouraged to
witness too much. The feeling that we have been
caught looking is both perversely pleasurable and
intolerable, and suggests shades of the primal scene
with all of its ambivalence, guilt and pathos.
If Golub’s paintings are provocations aimed towards
the spectator, they are also indictments of a particularly exaggerated strain of masculine ritual, a highly
codified phallic combat. His Mercenaries participate in
homosocial cults based on a kind of Sadean camaraderie, ritually bonding through torture and brutality.
Golub seems to believe in the will-to-power as the
most fundamental bedrock for human relations, a
central axiom of desire, certainly the dominant force in
masculine conflict, which Golub describes as “a continuing, existential, violent struggle, all manner of
social/psychic tension.” Donald Kuspit observes that
October 2002
The charge that Golub is often willfully oblivious
towards the complexities of the situations he depicts,
reducing the radical contingency of historical circumstances to the status of a recurring nightmare of
singular brutality, is difficult to refute. Golub gives us
no clues as to the motivations, desires, or unique
pathologies of his subjects. Instead of inviting us in,
Golub’s paintings seem to present an impassable
chasm between both the subjects within the painting,
and the viewer and the work. The stiff, cartoonish
style in which the figures are rendered, set within an
inarticulate, hazy background, contributes to a
pervading sense of muteness that emanates from the
canvases.
Sade’s Fodder
39
Such images of suffering in the media have a
secondary effect: in addition to increasing our general
numbness, they also serve to diffuse and dispel our
anxiety about global conflict. They depress us, give
us a transitory feeling of identification and awareness,
and then disappear. Our
compulsion to consume such
images is a measure of our need
for reassurance that the violence remains safely outside,
contained as it were, beyond the
pale. The power of Golub’s art
seems to be its ability to make
us acutely aware of our inability
to comprehend, our conditioned
complacency with regard to the
historical forces that shape war
and its representations.
off-putting, and seems to call into question many of
our expectations about what paintings could or should
provide. Simply put, the paintings are difficult to look
at. So what is it that makes them so compelling?
Bad Subjects
images, whose goriness stands in direct relation to
their distance from the U.S. and its foreign policy
interests. At the same time, our skepticism towards
what we see has been further eroded by the bombardment of fictionalized images of violence that
proudly advertise their accuracy, authenticity and
“grimly realistic” depiction of human suffering, as
seen recently in Black Hawk Down. Clearly the line
between entertainment and information has been
profoundly blurred, and our ability to identify or
empathize with the victims of war and terror has
diminished. While we may be appalled by photographs of dead or mutilated bodies, terror squads or
riots, we feel helpless to respond.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
40
the extreme grotesqueness of Golub’s villains points
towards their powerlessness, and that this powerlessness is the primary source of their rage, their seeming
inexhaustible hunger for carnage.
The nothingness of the victim becomes the paradoxical, distorting mirror of their own inner nothingness,
and they have an endless hunger for victims. The
dialectic between on the one hand the inner sense
of hollowness and powerlessness of Golub’s
figures, and on the other their outer display of
power and dominance, is perhaps the most
intriguing dialectic in Golub, for it is the dialectic
of identity.
The victims in Golub’s paintings, meanwhile, are
the disenfranchised, the wretched of the Earth
who have long suffered invisibly under the tyranny of imperialism, the reckless exploits of
capitalism. They are, as Aimé Césaire puts it in
the poem Notebook of a Return to the Native
Land, “the famine-man, the insult-man, the
torture-man you can grab anytime, beat up, kill—
no joke, kill—without having to account to anyone, without having to make excuses to anyone.” They
are nobodies reduced to the status of mere objects,
and as such, utterly dispensable.
In the Vietnam paintings some of the victims are
literally annihilated, cut out of the painting entirely. In
the Interrogation series victim’s faces are often
hooded, engulfed in shadow, or so crudely rendered as
to deny individuality. Mercenaries V shows a white
mercenary crouched, grinning stupidly at the viewer,
as he trains a gun on black youths who kneel in
subjugation. Golub’s victims, like Blanchot observes of
the victims of Sade’s libertines, exist solely as fodder:
The creatures [the libertine] encounters there are
less than things, less than shades. And when he
torments and destroys them he is not wrestling away
their lives but verifying their nothingness, establishing
his authority over their non-existence, and from this
he derives his greatest satisfaction.
The message is clear: the victims are expressionless, a dead-end. But what about Golub’s tyrants
themselves? They are at once robotic and deterministic soldiers, social machines subject to militaristic ritual
and brainwashing, while still somehow retaining the
qualities of autonomous subjects, exercising the most
extreme variants of free will, choosing to act.
This unresolved paradox of free will/determinism
echoes in another of Golub’s recurring elements – the
dog – which first appears as an accomplice of the
villains, later as a solitary force. Golub states:
The dog has an atavistic relationship to humans.
When men first began to hunt and the dog associated
itself with man, dogs would surround or attack the
hunted animal and the men would come up and finish
the job. The dog represented an extension, even a
vanguard, of man’s savagery.
The dog is a servant of man, a proxy, and a radical
force of aggression. Golub has likened the energy of
the dog to the act of painting in terms of being an
expression of freedom, but clearly dogs are subject to
forces that are precisely the opposite of freedom.
Animals, according to Heidegger’s formulation, are
“secured” in the world – that is, do not deviate from
what they are supposed to do, are fundamentally and
completely united with the drive. Humanity, however, exists in a state of “throwed-ness” and must
constantly confront the discontinuity of his being-inthe-world, his Dasein.
So Golub’s
dogs and villains
enjoy a kind of
reciprocal relationship. Functioning as condensations of
pure drive, they
are machines
with a radically
contingent,
unhinged will,
bent on destruction. Humans
Mercenaries V
and dogs tend to
travel in packs,
borrowing from the group what they lack as individuals. Yet this alone is not sufficient to explain the
extremity of their behavior. Golub seems to suggest
that it is capitalist society in fact which promotes the
escalation of such extreme imbalances of power, and
consequently that one only has to be in the right
place at the right time to fall into the trap.
What ultimate conclusions are to be drawn from
Golub’s compulsion to repeat these acts of barbarity,
of trauma, enacted at such a grand scale and with
such unremitting vulgarity? Trauma, according to
Freud, is an event that the subject refuses or is
unable to remember, and thus is doomed to repeat
through various guises, never succeeding in fully
integrated it into the his psychic economy. Golub’s
repeated invocations of brutality, in a sense, never
seem to grow closer to the “truth” of the act, never
allow us into the minds of the perpetrators.
But perhaps this is precisely the point. Lacan
modified Freud’s formula by characterizing trauma as
a missed encounter with the Real, a failure to find an
adequate form of representation (the Real being
precisely that which resists representation), which
leads to the event’s being compulsively repeated in a
tragic, fatalistic compulsion. Like Cézanne, Golub
seems emphatic about “getting it right,” that is,
repeatedly attempting to capture something of the
essence of his subject while fully cognizant of the
futility of this endeavor. The traumatic Real recedes
farther and farther into the flatness of the screen.
What we are left with ultimately is our own discomfort, our own shame, our own criminality.
In 1937 Adorno also stated, “Every work of art is an
uncommitted crime.”
_______________
Aaron Scott <aaascott@hotmail.com> is an artist living in
Brooklyn. He writes occasionally on art and film.
Sarah Ramirez
Do You Hear as You Listen?
Lila Downs’ musical creations and performances are
motivated by a series of aesthetic and political considerations. Her music expresses a
defiant, contestatory, at times critical
stance towards both the United States
and Mexico. Through this music, she
attempts to voice issues of gender
and ethnicity as they relate to national
identity, transnational economies, and
power. Specifically, her music critiques relations of power, homogenizing notions of mestizaje, and
gendered ethnic niches in which
women become exploitable pools of
labor. Her album Trazos, a noncommercial 1999 release, presents
two excellent examples of Lila Downs’
performance and transnational politics. Both “La Niña” and “Sale
Sobrando” are Downs’ original works
that have recently been re-released in
her latest album “Border.” Their
dance-able cumbia rhythm demonstrates the way in which her musical “entertainment”
conveys didactic and political messages.
Se hará algún día?
In “La Niña” Downs sings directly to Rosa María, a
dark-haired girl with a sad face, who toils without end
or escape in the maquiladora border factories. Similar to the messages conveyed in Amparo Ochoa’s “La
Mujer,” Downs sings about the young girl’s life
slipping away in the drudgery of her labor. However,
in this case, labor is not associated with domestic
October 2002
Identifying a position from which it is possible to
explore cultural productions of Mexicana and Chicana
connective politics, Sonia
Saldívar-Hull speaks of a
transfrontera feminism, an
oppositional feminist consciousness to which
Chicanas bring, “material
geopolitical issues that
redirect feminist discourse.”
In redirecting feminist
discourse, Saldívar Hull
affirms that border feminism
deconstructs geopolitical
boundaries by re-conceptualizing feminist method and
theory. Breaking with
traditional hegemonic
concepts of feminism,
border feminism validates
alternative nontraditional
spaces as sites for feminist
empowerment. In her
examination of Sandra Cisneros’ Women Hollering
Creek, Saldívar-Hull speaks specifically to Mexican
popular feminism and Chicana transfrontera feminist
practices exchanged across the border. Saldívar-Hull
recognizes that Cisneros’ text “changes the subject of
dominant, patriarchal discourse and lets readers
imagine how transfrontera feminist and Mexican
feminismo popular can converge in other spaces and
under other circumstance to produce socially nuanced
global Chicana Mexicana coalitions.”
Born in Oaxaca to an Anglo-American father and a
Mixtec Indian mother, Downs grew up living in
Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca and Minneapolis, Minnesota as well
as in Southern California. Her songs in Spanish,
English, Mixteco, Mayan, Nahuatl, and Zapotec reflect
these transnational, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual
influences. Borrowing from José Saldívar, Downs’
lyrical and musical repertoire is framed by her “gender and dissident ethnographic consciousness.”
In order to transform the male-dominated Mexican
cultural legacies present in Chicano nationalism,
Chicanas not only have had to re-write themselves into
the “movement script,” but as Angie ChabramDernersesian reminds us, Chicanas had to participate
in a Chicana-Mexicana connectivity through recuperation and transformation of Mexican female symbols
and icons. Chicanas have also turned to Mexican
feminist movements for guidance and followed separate but parallel courses. Similarly, contemporary
Mexican feminists critically selected from cross-cultural
feminist positions as part of a politics of connectivity.
These transnational feminist exchanges, specifically
Chicana-Mexicana connectivities, travel along different
networks.
Mexican singer Lila Downs presents a clear example
of transnational feminist politics and identity. Her
musical repertoire draws from a variety of musical
styles ranging from traditional Mexican songs, indigenous poetry, jazz, to the folk/protest songs of
Woody Guthrie. Her work exemplifies what can be
seen in a community that crosses generations,
national borders, and cultures.
41
Bad Subjects
“Aquí La Justicia Sale
Sobrando”: Lila Downs and
Transfrontera Music
October 2002
Bad Subjects
42
housework; rather, Downs directly associates the
drudgery of labor with the maquiladora factories. Not
only does this young girl realize that her job is taking
its toll on her, she also realizes that all her efforts,
dreams, and desires are becoming distant memories.
More than simply addressing the exploitation of
women in these gendered labor niches, “La Niña” calls
attention to the exploitation of child labor. The
hopelessness and lack of escape traps the young girl
in a never-ending cycle of exploitation. Not even
religiosity or faith are able to help the young girl;
after all, it is the young girl’s patron saint that rests
while she works all day
Revealing a counterculture to modernity, the song
fluctuates between what Paul Gilroy calls the politics
of transfiguration and the politics of fulfillment.
Whereas the politics of fulfillment alludes to the idea
that a future society will be able to realize the social
and political promise that present society left
unaccomplished, the politics of transfiguration “reveals the internal problems in the concept of modernity.” The politics of transfiguration creates a counterculture to modernity through its invocation of utopia
that demands “the formation of a community of needs
and solidarity.”
This evocation of the utopian vision is evident in the
repetition of the phrase “Será algún día.” The
utopian vision requires that someday the
maquiladoras will be a memory of the past, that there
will be equality, and that those who have benefited
from the exploitation of maquiladora labor will apologize. Downs calls for this young girl to be equal to
the rest and also envisions that some day the young
girl will reap the benefit of her own labor. However,
at the same time that the song evokes this utopian
image, the lyrics also demand a critique of unequal
relations of power and exploitation of labor by referring to maquiladora disappearances. In calling for the
disappeared to receive justice, Downs specifically
refers to the unexplained disappearances, brutal
beatings, and deaths of hundreds of young Mexican
women at U.S. border maquiladoras. Ironically the
song’s vision of utopia coexists alongside the real
consequences that borders have on the daily lives of
real people.
The performance opens up another possibility in this
tension between reality and utopia. As the song
ends, the fluctuations in her voice as well as the
serious tone conveyed through its repetition contribute to an interpretive ambiguity. Is Downs singing
“Será algún día” or “Se hará algún día” (It will be
some day), or is she questioning the very same
utopian image by asking “¿Será algún día?” or “¿Se
hará algún día?” (Will it be some day?). This
performative ambiguity resonates with what Gilroy
notes as the tensions between both the politics of
transfiguration and politics of fulfillment that are
“closely associated in the vernacular…[and] reflect[s]
the idea of doubleness” often regarded as the “constitutive experience of the modern world.”
Derechos Humanos, Sale Sobrando
“Sale Sobrando” also vocalizes a counterculture to
modernity. Dense with messages, tropes of
mexicanismos, cultural and national symbols, Downs
critiques multiple contradictions and forms of oppression as well as repression. Lila Downs’ aesthetic
performance evokes emotion through song and is
important to consider. She alters the sound of her
voice at critical points and vocalizes nonverbal sounds
to convey her message. As a result, her musical
performance becomes another opaque vehicle participating in the politics of transfiguration. Downs
conflates power relations, especially those inherent in
modernity, with progress, transnational relations, and
the contradictions within Mexican national identity
and demands their critical attention.
The song begins with the Mexican foundation
narrative “Los hombres barbados Vinieron por barco Y
todos dijeron “mi Dios ha llegado.”” Disputing the
“discovery” of Ameríca, the song documents the
encounter between the indigenous population and
Spanish explorers in which the Spanish explorers
were “welcomed” into Mexico. Beginning with these
images, the first lines of the song bear a striking
parallel to Gabino Palomares’ song “Maldicíon de
Malinche” which also deals with similar themes, but
does so in a way that continues a masculinist legacy
that blames Mexico’s problem and crisis of identity on
Malinche’s legacy. Downs, however, takes a different
approach to Mexico’s identity “crisis.” She directly
aims her critique on modernization and modernity’s
homogenization of national identities. Specifically
Downs’ critique revisits the notions of the Mexican
intellectual elite, who shortly after the Mexican
Revolution began to conceptualize the Mestizo as the
embodiment of a universal cosmic race that fused all
races in Mexico into the Mexicano. They maintained
that the Mestizo represented natural progression and
the future of mankind. Mexican nationalism forged its
national identity “myth” through the concept of
mestizaje. Downs’ desire to expose the contradictions
of Mexican nationalism becomes further evident in the
line: “Mexicanos al grito de guerra,” the first line of
the Mexican national hymn.
Although to some, violence directed toward native
populations in Mexico and the violence inflicted on
immigrants in the US seem like separate issues,
Downs brings them together. She links them through
the intricate web of exploitation inherent in
modernity, progress, and transnational global
capitalism. “Sale Sobrando” juxtaposes a series of
commentaries, some which document actual events.
The lines “En Chiapas mujeres y niños rezan/
machetes y balas con sangre bañar” evoke the Actéal,
Chiapas murders of December 22, 1997. With many
in church sanctuary, 45 Tzotziles people were killed—
21 of them women and 14 children; 25 more were
injured and 5 were “disappeared.” When Downs
sings, “La migra y el border patrol/te agarran, y luego
te dan su bendicíon,” she highlights the United States’
contradictory immigrant policy and its connection to
an economy based on the exploitation of workers who
cross the borders, are not welcomed, yet endure
Downs’ music invites, or perhaps challenges
transnational feminist politics, to consider reaching
out to broader female masses and to include the
rights of indigenous women. Connective feminist
politics, in this case, is intimately tied to a common
gender struggle, but it is also a struggle against
internalized racism and the
erasure of indigenous populations in Mexico. Her music and
performance is not limited by the
binaries of national borders or
identities suggesting that the
“contact zone” is more than a
geo-political location, it is also
the site where ideological and
psychological battles of cultural
contact and conflict are waged.
The music of Lila Downs, in the
words of Ramón Saldívar,
“documents a transnational
people whose lives form the
space of a new ‘contact zone,’
one for which the notion of a
singular political, social, or
cultural identity may no longer
suffice.”
This knowledge can, as Michelle Habell-Pallán
argues with regard to the international appeal in the
music of El Vez, “contribute to a new understanding
of community—one that responds to an exploitative
transnationalism—and the possibility of an international political agency and musical sensibility of social
subjects that, because of their unique histories and
social predicaments, do not possess the luxury of
ethnic or national absolutism.”
_______________
Sarah Ramirez <sramirez@stanford.edu> is a doctoral
candidate in Modern
Thought and Literature at Stanford University
October 2002
With regards to these
transnational movements, it is
important to note that over the
last three years, Downs has
increasingly received national
and international recognition,
appearing in venues such as the
Sacred Music Festival, World’s
Fair in Lisbon, Mexican Fine Arts
Center, and the World Music
Festival in Chicago. Her international appeal may, as George
Lipsitz argues, allow for a
peculiarity of place that would otherwise remain
hidden; the appeal of her international music has the
ability to “make local and national knowledge more
important rather less.”
43
Countering what some
perceive as stable mixed
Mexican identities, Downs’
experiences and examples
present images that
deconstruct the stability
of this image. She reveals
the problematic ways in
which mestizaje
simplistically seeks to
eliminate traces of
difference. While
everyone: Indian, black,
white, and mestizo form
the Mexican nation, not
everyone is an equal part
of it. She conveys this
internalized rejection of
difference in her lyrics:
“cuando mires no te va
gustar, tu cara es morena
y quieres ser guera y bien
que te comes tu taco y
memela,” These lyrics
dramatize what Inés
Hernández-Ávila calls the
“internalized racism of
Indian hating that frames
the mestiza consciousness
and manifests itself with a
shame and rage at being
Indian,” a situation Downs has had to personally
overcome. The sarcastic mocking laugh that follows
these lyrics serves to emphasize the ironic
contradictions between the idealized concept of
mestizaje and the unequal reality. Although mestizaje
is seen as a way to fracture or fuse binaries, “Sale
Sobrando” does not applaud mestizaje. Rather, it
challenges the concept of mestizaje. In a firm tone,
Downs scolds the mestizo who is made to answer to
his complicity in this process of homogenizing
erasures. “Mestizo haz de ser por tus vicios” is
followed by a painful wail. These nonverbal sounds are
strategically placed in the text to amplify her critique
and message.
“Sale Sobrando” closes with calling into question
notions of justice. While tourists and foreigners,
privileged in easily crossing the border, are able to go
to Mexico, she sees their efforts as in vain. “What do
they worry for—human rights?” Downs asks. She
responds, “Justice here is good for nothing.” Justice,
as she has sung, only applies to certain individuals
who conform to the nationalist rhetoric of mestizaje.
Bad Subjects
violent repression. “Bendicíon” has a double meaning;
it is a physical act of blessing, but in this case it
sarcastically refers to the beatings utilized by the
border patrol. Downs use of “bendicíon” also bears
witness and evokes historically violent forms of
religious conversion, the complicity of religious
institutions’ non-intervention on the behalf of social
justice, and, finally, critiques the way in which the
perpetrators of violence are absolved of their crimes.
After all, aren’t they the guardians of the border,
above all laws, sins, and trespasses? Through these
examples, “Sale Sobrando” addresses how inequalities,
produced through structures of power, resurface in
other contact zones. In other words, Downs
articulates how communal identities, as well as
unequal power relations,
are also (inter)national.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
44
Hyper-masculine and
Misogynist Violence
in Chicano Rap
Pancho McFarland
Growing up in northern New Mexico my models of
Chicano/Mexican American masculinity and femininity
were varied. My grandfather and his brothers were
gentle men who gained satisfaction from positive,
mutually edifying human interaction with men and
women. They taught me about compassion and love.
My friends presented a tough, hyper-masculine façade
they learned from their eastside barrio and from the
violence they saw around them in the boxing gym,
the streets and, importantly, in our mass media.
They taught me how to fight.
My models of Chicana/Mexicana womanhood, the
women in my family, did not take shit from anyone —
including their husbands. They were strong and
caring. Their endless stories emanating from the
kitchen and the poker table taught me about the
pitfalls of being a male chauvinist pig, while at the
same time they warned my sister to be chaste and
not get a “reputation.”
I began learning to be a “man” by dare-deviltry and
drinking in the early 1980s, the same time that rap
and hip hop culture began to break out of its original
home in New York City and go nationwide. Rap
images of black masculinity combined with those of
Mexican American masculinity
to inform my search for
manhood. By the late 1980s I
was firmly ensconced in
academia and rap had burst
onto the pop culture stage. In
1990 Kid Frost became the first
Chicano to make it in the rap
game. His Hispanic Causing
Panic LP and hit single “La
Raza” were godsends for me
and other Chicano rappers and
break-dancers. Unfortunately,
its hyper-masculine bravado
mirrored the attitudes that led
me and many of my friends to
fight, drink, consume drugs and
otherwise harm ourselves and
others.
styles and often-angry lyrics spoke to me as a
Chicano in the Ivory Tower. They responded to the
institutions that oppressed them, the police, the
schools, etc., in ways that at times I wished I could
have responded to the oppression I experienced at
the university. I co-authored my first article on rap,
“Quiet as It’s Kept: Rap as a Model for Resisting the
Academy,” in 1998. Since then I have written several
pieces focused on Chicano rap.
Cholo Rap
In the last four years the violence of Chicano rap
has made a profound impression on me. Chicano
rappers rap about hitting each other, hitting cops, and
hitting and abusing women. My first question was
why do these young men spend so much time thinking about, writing about, and listening to stories of
violence? For me, rap and hip hop culture, had been
about escaping violence and oppression. It was about
getting together and expressing ourselves with our
bodies and voices. Of course, break-dancing battles
often turned violent and people fought at parties that
showcased hip hop culture. Nonetheless, hip hop was
mostly a safe space. So, why all the violence in
Chicano rap today?
First, understanding
Chicano rap requires examination of Mexican male
expressive culture, black male
expressive culture and the
dominant culture. Second,
our society is in the midst of a
crisis of masculinity attracting
men to consume and produce
violent popular culture. Third,
the extreme misogyny in
Chicano rap results from our
notions of masculinity that
equate manhood with demeaning the Other, especially
women.
The first and most direct
model of masculinity informing the narratives of Chicano
Later, in the midst of writing
rappers comes in the form of
Kid Frost
my dissertation I used rap
Mexican male oral culture and
music as a way of confronting
traditions. In my community
the academy’s most racist and classist elements, and
the question about boxing was not whether to box or
to re-affirm my identity as a brown man steeped in
not, but when you would get into your first fight. We
the traditions of working-class Hispano New Mexico.
revered the Chicano lumpenproletariat, the cholo and
Rap’s aggressive beats, cacophonous production
pachuco who dished out more pain than he received.
During the 1980s we also witnessed the rise of the
Hollywood blockbuster movie that more often than
not featured a violent male hero. He didn’t allow
anyone to get over on him; he, too, seemed to be
loved by the women. We also became victims of the
flood of guns and drugs into our communities, and the
economic violence of the Reagan years that led many
to turn to illicit entrepreneurship as their means of
survival. Economic restructuring led to extreme
poverty in some communities, which according to the
get-tough-on-crime logic could only be contained with
more cops and more prisons. Gang task forces were
created to keep young brown men in their neighborhoods and an all-out War on Youth of Color followed.
Police have become militarized and now turn on us
the high-tech weaponry and communication systems
used to defeat foreign enemies.
Hyper-masculinity and Dead Homies
So violence exploded in the barrios. It seeped into
our homes through our TV screens and into our hoods
through police and gang violence. With this legacy of
violence in our expressive culture and our streets, one
shouldn’t be surprised at the hyper-violence narrated
by Chicano rappers. Nonetheless, I can’t stop asking
why. Violence isn’t the only occurrence in the barrio.
We hate, but we also love. We go to church, dance,
laugh, and care for our gardens. We hug our children, party with friends, and respect life. Yet none of
this makes it onto rap CDs. Rappers leave out most
of what occurs in our barrios and small towns, along
with the social privilege that destroys us. Why?
Boys are taught hyper-masculinity from Day One.
“Don’t cry!,” “Don’t be a sissy!,” “You throw like a
girl!” shout our fathers and mothers, teachers and
coaches. To be a man is to not be a woman. And a
woman is weak, frail, and passive. To be a man is to
shun the feminine like a virus. Signs of weakness are
a “no-no.” In our either-or dichotomous system of
logic, weakness is the opposite of strength. A young
man demonstrates his strength through daily performances of violent masculinity because, as Michael
Kimmel points out, as soon as you have proven your
manhood through acts of daring you must prove it
again or risk the labels “pussy” or “fag.” Moreover,
the corporate media’s violent, masculine superheroes
— the Stallones, Willises and Schwarzneggers —
dominate the pop culture landscape. These are our
models of manhood.
So we run from the feminine. We dehumanize
women with our jokes and locker-room lies. All the
while violence against women increases sanctioned by
our popular culture. The slasher genre of Hollywood
film and a large sector of commercial rap legitimize
the victimization of women. In the end objectified
female images dehumanize women and further
entrench male privilege.
Still young men wouldn’t focus their aesthetics
almost entirely on violence if violence didn’t sell.
Young Chicanos trying to make it out of the barrio rap
about violence because they have astutely analyzed
the rap music marketplace and see that three central
themes have cornered the rap industry. Sex, violence
and money sell better than love, kindness and generosity. After the late 1980s when rap became a multibillion dollar industry, themes related to politics,
social criticism and alternative lifestyles fell by the
wayside. Greed and violence fill the airwaves and
young Chicanos listen to the radio. As bell hooks
argues, perhaps the question should not be why
Chicano rappers focus on violence, but rather why we
consume it. Our video games, films, televisions, and
October 2002
The media helped disseminate the hateful War on
Youth of Color by presenting us as the face of violence. News stories featuring brown and black men
warned middle-class America about the gang menace.
Sensationalized stories of innocent victims, usually
white, being killed by drive-by shootings filled the
airwaves. While the CIA and the US military quietly
destroyed much of Central America, the media loudly
declared the existence of an epidemic of minority
youth violence. As a result few outside the barrios
and ghettos questioned commando raids in the inner-
45
As a result of the commodification of blackness in
the larger US culture through rap and the
gangxploitation film genre, we had a new model of
hyper-masculinity: the Bad Nigga. In black male oral
culture the Bad Nigga has a long history similar to the
male Mexican hero figure. From Stagga Lee to Shaft
to Ice-T, the Bad Nigga served as a symbol of defiant
black manhood. Since both black and Mexican male
cultures lauded the strong, often violent man, we
were familiar with the new postmodern social bandit,
the black gangsta. Gangsta-style rap was a natural
direction in which to take Chicano male expressive
culture. It was aggressive, hyper-masculine and
“real.”
city that destroyed homes and families, and
criminalized and imprisoned a large part of an entire
generation.
Bad Subjects
We drew pictures of the cholo, dressed like him,
spoke like him, and behaved like him. Many of us
became him. Why not? The cholo challenged his
oppression with gun in hand. Girls liked him. He was
strong, handsome and brown. We heard the corridos
and other Mexican (American) music that celebrated
the social bandit who protected himself and his people
“with his pistol in his hand.” We heard the stories of
our distant relatives who rode with Pancho Villa
fighting for land and liberty in the Mexican Revolution,
and others who fought, died and killed for their
country in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The
brave, honorable Mexican man fought. Violence and
hyper-masculinity became somewhat of a norm for
young Chicanos.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
46
music normalize and naturalize violence. Instead of
seeing violence as a social ill, it excites and entertains
us. Violence sells and we consume it.
However, this doesn’t mean that Chicano rappers
are simply duped by a violent system into creating an
aesthetic of violence. Violence isn’t simply a picture
on a screen or an image in a song. It is real and
disproportionately affects poor, inner-city youth of
color. While a great deal of violence is gratuitous and
packaged as a commodity to be consumed as entertainment, Chicano rappers also attempt to analyze
the very real violence around them. When Sir Dyno
asks “What Have I Become?” as a result of a violent
lifestyle or when the Latin Bomb Squad question the
eye-for-an-eye mentality that kills homies and devastates families, they aren’t simply glorifying violence or
parroting our violent society.
This seemingly nihilistic obsession with violence is,
as De Genova argues, a means by which young
Chicanos cope with the violence around them and
examine questions about humanity. Discussing
violence helps Chicanos better understand life and
death and the struggle for humanity. In an environment saturated with economic and physical violence,
Chicano rappers make meaning of our world through
the contemplation of death.
Where are Mexican men like my grandfather? Many
still live in their communities. Why aren’t their
models of masculinity more prominent in popular
culture? Why aren’t their voices heard? Has globalized, homogenized mass culture replaced interpersonal relationships that we once relied on to structure
our manhood and womanhood?
We must remember these men. But, perhaps more
importantly, we should embrace positive aspects of
femininity to counter the epidemic of hyper-masculinity. The violent, destructive rage of rappers should be
challenged by a constructive rage informed by positive notions of womanhood, manhood and Mexicanness. Chicano rap’s violence should not be censored
or shunned. Instead, we should engage these young
men in an intra-cultural and intergenerational dialogue that takes into account the multiple perspectives and heterogeneous lives of women and the
myriad ways of being Mexican men.
In an interview for the Voices of Freedom film
project Bernice Reagon Johnson informs us that she
constantly begs older black people to teach all that
they know of black culture and traditions. She tells
them “don’t go to the grave with your knowledge.”
Similarly, I challenge Mexican-origin elders to
intervene in the hip hop community. Do not write off
our children as hopeless. To combat the crippling
violence and misogyny in our communities and youth
we must educate ourselves and our children in the
egalitarian, democratic, and communal aspects of our
culture. We should study and discuss the work of
writers like Ana Castillo and Cherrie Moraga, artists
like Yolanda Lopez, and filmmakers like Esperanza
Vásquez. Engaging rappers in a mutually respectful
dialogue that uses the cultural production of Chicana
feminists as a counterweight to cultural violence can
open new ideas of masculinity and humanity, so
sorely needed in this era.
_______________
Pancho McFarland <lmcfarla@uccs.edu> is an Assistant
Professor of Sociology at University of Colorado at Colorado
Springs.
Corridos, Cantantes, y La Frontera :
Modern Aesthetics and Violence in
Mexicano and Chicana/o Ballads
Peter J. Garcia
Mexican and Chicana/o working classes have a long
tradition of ballad responses to racial and gender
violence, a tradition that now includes ballads about
the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade
Center in New York City. The Mexican corrido has
been described as a social barometer of Mexican
attitudes toward events affecting their lives. The
corrido has long been an expression reflecting public
values and a community’s interpretation of the historical process.
Today, the corrido continues to sustain values,
ethnic solidarity, and loyalty for causes that the
masses see as important to their cultural survival.
Corridos are important ethno-historical documents
providing a range of facts regarding the social environment. Their contents, poetic organization, musical
form, and aesthetic history lead to an alternative
interpretation of the nature of violence in Mexican and
American societies as seen through the Mexican’s
sense of history, music, and culture. This is true of
the corrido among Mexicans in the United States.
Here too, the corrido has functioned as a “collective
diary,” expressing symbolically the Chicano people’s
reactions to events vital to their self-interests.
El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez
One night in the
middle of December
At a dance where
he presented
himself
Where the
beautiful Anita was
to be found
Waiting anxiously
for her love
Al llegar a ese baile
celebrado
En la puerta
Juanito se paró
Desde ahí vió a
Anita que bailaba
Con un joven quien
el desconocio
Arriving at that
celebrated dance
At the door
Juanito stood
From there he
could see that
Anita danced
with a youth
whom he did not
know
Que enorme el
coraje que sentilla
Fue tan fuerte que
loco le volvio
Que mirando la
piesa que bailaba
Frente a Anita
Juanito se paró
How enormous
was his rage
that it’s intensity
drove him mad
Just watching the
steps that they
danced
In front of Anita,
Juanito went and
stood
Mira Anita, ya vi lo
que me has hecho
Me traicionas y
tienes que pagar
Ya te vi en los
brazos de ese
hombre
Por lo tanto se que
te va a pesar
Look Anita, I
have seen what
you have done
You are betraying
me, so you must
pay
I have seen you
in the arms of that
man
Right now, I know
that you are going
to regret it
Decidido y con
pistola en mano
Muy furioso Juanito
le apuntó
Yo soy hombre y tu
me has traicionado
Nuestro amor ya
con esto terminó
Once decided and
with his pistol in
his hand
Very furious,
Juanito pointed his
gun.
I am a man and
you have betrayed
me
Our love, with
this, has ended
Contemporary Mejicano Corridos
El Corrido de Juanito by Mauricio Sanchez
“No me mates”,
Anita le decía
“Dame tiempo a
una explicacion”
“Don’t kill me,”
Anita said.
“Give me time for
an explanation”
October 2002
Soon after his capture
many Mexicans expressed their support of
Cortez and raised
financial support to
fight his court case.
Cortez became a hero
and a symbol of the
Mexican people in Texas
who were subject to
racism, injustice, and
discrimination at the
hands of Anglos. After three trials on separate charges
arising out of the original events, resulting in three
guilty verdicts, three appeals court reversals, and one
acquittal, Cortez was finally convicted of murder. He
was given a life sentence, but was pardoned on July 7,
1913, after spending twelve years in prison. Cortez’s
case struck a responsive and sympathetic chord in the
hearts of his compatriots. (A 1949 version of Gregorio
Cortez, shortened for the juke box is included on the
Smithsonian Folkways CD Borderlands: From Conjunto
to Chicken Scratch Music from the Rio Grande Valley of
Texas and Southern Arizona.)
Una noche a
mediados de
diciembre
En el baile que
Juan se presento
Se encontraba
Anita muy hermosa
Esperando con
ancias a su amor
47
In the ensuing fracas Cortez shot and killed the
sheriff after the later had drawn his own gun and
wounded Cortez’s brother, Rumaldo. Convinced that he
would never get a fair trail in Texas, Cortez fled. For
the next ten days, sometimes literally slipping through
the fingers of the army that pursued him, Cortez
eluded his captors. He was finally seized just thirty
miles shy of his destination, the Rio Grande and
Mexico. The chase had taken ten days, during which
Cortez walked at least
one hundred twenty
miles and rode more
than four hundred on
brown and sorrel
mares. He had been
chased by hundreds of
men, in parties of up to
three hundred. He had
killed two sheriffs and
fought off many posses.
Here goes
Juanito’s corrido
He is a man of
sad heart
He killed the
woman he most
loved
Right now he
finds himself in
prison
Bad Subjects
El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez is probably the best
known corrido throughout the Southwest and deals
with interracial conflict between Anglos and Mexicans.
It is based on a true story. According to
ethnomusicologist Manuel Peña, Gregorio Cortez was
apparently a peaceful Mexican until the afternoon of
June 12, 1901 when Sheriff W.T. (Brack) Morris came
to Cortez’s home in South Texas. Sheriff Morris was
after a horse thief and attempted to arrest Cortez, who
was later cleared of the charges.
Ahí les va el corrido
de Juanito
Es un hómbre de
triste corazón
El mató a la mujer
que mas quería
Y ahóra mismo se
encuentra en la
prisíon
October 2002
Bad Subjects
48
Al instante oyeron
dos desparos
Y uno dellos rompió
su corazón
At that moment,
two shots sounded
And one wounded
her heart
Quando Anita
estaba agonizando
Ha su lado Juanito
se acercó
“por tus celos mira
lo que me has
hecho”
“Me has herido sin
tener culpa yo”
While Anita was in
agony
Juanito approached
her side
“Because of your
jealousy, look what
you have done to
me”
You have hurt me
when I wasn’t at
fault
“Ese joven con el
que yo bailaba”
“Ese joven es mi
hermano mayor”
“He pagado por
algo que no hice”
“Te perdono” era
su ultima expresión
That young man
whom I was dancing
with
That young guy is
my older brother
“I paid for something I didn’t do”
“I forgive you” was
her final word
(author’s translation)
This corrido may be interpreted in many ways. The
first thing that stands out is absence of the copla. The
ballad maintains uses four-line stanzas with eleven
syllables per line. Likewise the line “con pistola en
mano/with his pistol in his hand” is also used in El
Corrido de Gregorio Cortez. It is an interesting
metaphor for Mexican machismo. Narrative folk
ballads of Mexican origin typically have regular
metrical features such as rhyming quatrains (abcb)
and use traditional imagery. Those with “epic themes”
typically refer to conflict — sometimes personal, more
often social as in this case between men.
The protagonist of El Corrido de Juanito is of course
Juanito. Unlike Gregorio Cortez who was a heroic man
defending his political and civil human rights, and by
extension those of his community, against social
tyranny and oppression, Juanito reacts here to a
perceived assault on his masculinity and personal
dignity. From his vantage point, Anita is his possession and thus the object of both his wrath and affection. The innocent Anita is mistaken as la traidora
(traitor).
In a less than subtle way, perhaps the ballad
speaks more to the oppression of women in contemporary Mexican society. More importantly, the absence of details such as setting, place, and surnames
leaves the listener with ambivalent factual information
and renders the corrido a tragic comedy or comedy of
errors through omission of vital historical data and the
absurdity of the situation. This aesthetic feature
affects both structure and style and is called
fragmentismo, the process by which fragments of
ballads are torn from their context, leaving much
unexplained and producing, at times, abrupt beginnings and endings. Fragmentation is a central feature
of older Hispanic ballads. It is a unique aesthetic
technique that has developed over generations and is
agreeable and esthetically pleasing to singers, composers, and listeners. Of far greater importance however
than limited negative and positive female images is the
corrido’s larger gender politics and poetics of exclusion
and repression.
Narcocorridos
The narcocorrido has emerged as a recent sub-genre
of the Mexican classical corrido. Following his death,
Chalino Sanchez achieved popular canonization as a
legendary narcocorrido performer. Better known as ‘El
Pela Vacas,’ Rosalino ‘Chalino’ Sanchez Felix assumed
a legendary role as the revitalizer of the corrido.
Best known among the 24 million people who inhabit
the territories that unite or separate Mexico and the
United States, Chalino Sanchez became the number
one narcocorrido singer in his time. According to Ilan
Stavans, his reputation reaches far beyond, from his
native state of Sinaloa to the nearby Coahuila and
Durango and, emphatically, to the Mexican “suburbs”
of Los Angeles, where Chalino spent his most artistically fruitful years. Songs he popularized, like “Corrido
de Amistad,” are listened to religiously on the radio in
cantinas and at birthday parties, malls and mechanic
shops. His cassettes and CDs are astonishingly popular. By all accounts a mediocre singer with little stage
charisma, he is nevertheless a folk hero of epic proportions to Mexicans. Chalino’s songs address urgent
political and social issues head on: poverty, drug
traffic, injustice, discrimination, and the disillusionment
of a life spent chasing the ever-evasive dollar bill.
In one ballad a couple of girls disguise themselves as
nuns and drive a van full of cocaine, which they claim
is powdered milk for an orphanage in Phoenix. In
another, two brothers, Carlos and Raul, are the owners
of a circus that uses unfair strategies to push other
circuses out of business. The circus is an allegory for
Mexico of the late 1980s and early 1990s: the names
are obvious references to former Mexican president
Carlos Salinas de Gortari and his drug money convict
brother Raul.
Stavans points out that most narcocorridos celebrate
the semi-fictitious adventures of a righteous person,
usually a man, who dared to fight against the establishment. Chalino Sanchez’s life and death were very
violent. His music career was brief due to his unsolved
murder on May 16, 1992.
Chalino always wore a distinctive outfit, a cowboy
hat, white or striped shirt, dark slacks and boots,
together with ostentatious jewelry. He spoke with a
Sinaloan ranchero accent and looked like someone
straight out of the mountains. He came to the United
States at age 15 and followed the harvests from
California to Oregon, finally settling in Inglewood, a
Mexican-immigrant satellite town in Los Angeles.
At age fifteen he murdered a man called “El Chapo”
who had raped his sister. After the incident, Chalino
went to Los Angeles where he worked washing dishes,
selling cars, and helped his brother smuggle illegal
immigrants until Armando was was killed in Tijuana.
Today most people believe his death was tied to
illegal drug activity. Following a concert in Coachella,
twenty miles east of Palm Springs, an intoxicated,
unemployed 33 year-old jumped onstage and fired a
pistol in Chalino’s side, injuring him. Chalino’s reputation as a valiente, a brave macho, was bolstered by the
incident. In 1984, Chalino married Marisella Vallejo and
they soon had a son Adan and daughter Cynthia. That
same year, Chalino composed a corrido about his
brother that launched his musical career. Soon after this
first ballad, Chalino began to compose corridos on
commission, often accepting jewelry and firearms as
payment.
Racial conflict and violence has long been a way of life
along the United States/Mexican border. Following the
terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon on September 11th, the sensational sounds
and “in your face” images of violence and death on the
news took on a more heightened expression. Global
dissemination of violent cultural forms and symbolic
capital provides people with new ways of accommodating and reacting to an increasingly uncertain world
climate. The September 11th attack was no different.
Several corridos devoted to the tragedy have been
composed. One version is La Trajedia de Nueva York,
recorded by El As de la Sierra in the Banda Sinaloense
style. The text and translation of the ballad are as
follows:
Qué raya comenzó
en los Estado
Unidos?
Y miren cómo
empozó
con aviones
dirigidos
a esas torres tan
hermosas
el terrorismo ha
surgido.
No me quisiera
acordar
de imàgines tan
violentas.
What happened
In the United
States?
And look at how it
happened
with planes directed
at those lovely
towers
terrorism has
arrived.
I do not want to
remember
The violent images
In May 1992, after a packed performance in Culiacan,
Chalino and some relatives were stopped by armed
men driving a Chevrolet Suburban. Hours later, his
body was found by two campesinos, dumped by an
irrigation canal near a highway. He had been blindfolded
and his wrist had rope marks. He had been shot twice in
the back of the head. The mystery of his death remains
unsolved.
News of Chalino’s death spread far and wide across
the media. In migrant communities, however, the
corrido remains the newspaper of illiterate people.
Chalino was immortalized in homenajes, or corridos
composed and recorded in homage to him.
Ni me quiro
imaginar
en cuànta gente
està muerta.
en luto està el
mundo entero
esto es inicio de
guerra.
Que mentes tan
criminales
o tal vez sean
desquiciados
Nor do I want to
imagine
How many people
are dead.
The whole world is
grieving
This is the beginning
of war.
Such criminal minds,
or are they just
mad?
October 2002
Promoting commissioned narcocorridos can be
dangerous in today’s world. By the time Chalino had
composed several corridos, he hired a local norteño
band to record them. The band dallied and Chalino
opted to record the ballads himself. In 1989 he and his
band Los Cuatro de La Frontera recorded fifteen
corridos in Angel Parra’s studios. He made only fifteen
copies of his first tape and soon returned to record
another cassette with fifteen new hits. Soon after,
Chalino’s music struck a chord with his audience and
his recordings were in demand. An agent named Pedro
Rivera helped Chalino reach the peak of his musical
career. He began to play at clubs like “El Parral” and
radio stations gave play time to his recordings.
49
According to ethnomusicologist Helena Simonett,
“composed corridos tend to give the out view, and are
composed in the first person. Protagonists in this type
of narcocorrido are mystified and made modest. A
commissioned corrido, on the other hand, is a story
based more on a specific person. It tends to elaborate
on every move or action of an individual and specifically
states his or her position in the business. Commissioned
corridos are usually performed by close friends or
insider mafiosos. Commissioned corridos usually depict
the trafficker or drug lord as a colorful person, courageous, cool, with extreme capabilities and power.
La Tragedia de Nueva York
Bad Subjects
Chalino was sent to prison there for a series of small
crimes. It was during his incarceration that he came
across contraband smugglers who were also musicians
and he began composing corridos. Following his release,
he returned to LA where he traded marijuana and
cocaine. He ended his career as a narcotrafficante when
his musical career — which only lasted four years —
took off.
de qué países
vinieron
esos planes tan
malvados?
Dicen que son
talibanes
Los que estàn
involucrados
From what
country are
Those horrific
plans
They say they are
Taliban
the ones involved
La primera guerra
del signo
señores ya
comenzó
el que organizó el
ataque
no sabe en qué se
metió.
El que resulte
culpable
Ay pobrecita
nación!
Que planes tan
estudiados
al secuestrar cinco
aviones.
Con cieciocho
terroristas
hicieron
operaciones
Washington y
Nueva York
el blanco de esos
traidores.
The first war of
the century
Sirs, it has begun.
The one that
organized the
attack
doesn’t know what
he’s involved in.
The one responsible for this,
Oh, that poor
nation!
Such well
thought-out plans
hijacking five
airplanes
with eighteen
terrorists
they conducted
the operations
Washington and
New York
the traitor’s
target.
El martes negro
señores
las ocho y quince
serían
On Black Tuesday,
sirs,
at about 8:15
when at the Twin
Towers
cuando en las
Torres Gemelas
un avión se
estrellaría.
La gente se
imaginaba
que un accidente
sería.
La gente de Nueva
York
sin saber lo qué
pasaba
mirando y al ver
esa torre
otra avión se
aproximaba.
Como a los quince
minutos,
en la otra torre
chocaba.
Me da tristeza
cantarles
Pero lo tenía que
hacer
Los que iniciaron la
guerra
Prepàrense pa’
perder.
El país de ese
cobarde
Puede desaparecer.
October 2002
Bad Subjects
50
Ed Paschke, Violencia
an airplane would
crash.
The people thought
that it was an
accident.
The people of New
York,
without knowing
what has happening
looking at that
tower,
while another plane
was approaching.
About 15 minutes
later
another crash at the
tower.
It saddens me to
sing this to you
But I had to do it.
The ones responsible for starting the
war
Prepare to lose.
That coward’s
country
could disappear.
(translated by
Maribelle Sazazar)

foto adan chalino sanchez

Transcription

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